Okay ‘huge news’, we have moved our quotes to a neutral colour palette. I share this not because it’s going to change anyone’s days let alone lives, but it really brought to my attention how silly it is that I clung onto something so small that created so much agony for me. I cannot express to you the pain of having to get those colours in sequence like I was before hahaha!
Arran created the colour palette for the quotes back when we relaunched our branding late 2017. The template was created by him with no real understanding of how I was going to be laboring over them. There is only me collecting quotes and writing the letters and it’s a long laborious process, taking sometimes 12 hours a week. It’s something we do for free which makes no real business sense, but I simply hope to inspire everyone a tiny bit every day, and reach people in a meaningful way. It’s very hard to equate if I even make a difference with the Letters and if it’s worth continuing most of the time, to be honest!
I collect the quotes from all over, then add them all into Indesign into the template Arran created for me, export them into a folder, and then either pick one and write a letter based on it or write a letter and find a quote to match it and design it. And the colours thing really screwed me up. I would be grimacing trying to find a green one, or creating one, because we had them all sequenced and the last one was pink. WHY in god’s name might you ask? Because it was just how it was created and I just kept following it for an agonising year. Then we were with our friends in Bath, Cereal Magazine, that run a monochromatic magazine, travel guides and books and their whole office is shades of grey, and I thought, I fucking love grey. Arran loves grey (he’s obsessed with colour especially monochromatic tones) so if we made our quotes in shades grey, I would never have to worry about getting them in ‘order’.
Uncovering the somewhat mental things we do because ‘that’s how we always did them’ or ‘that’s how it was created’ is insanely liberating. And there are a tonne of things we each do like this just because we didn’t question it. I am more determined than ever to analyse more the nonsensical things in my life. To audit, edit and refine them. Why don’t you join me on this? I have found it’s the tiniest things that can create the most frustration, and are funnily usually the simplest to fix.
Sent with love,
Jac x