Create What You Wish Existed

Last time I wrote, I rambled about the common characteristics of design industry leaders. I talked about how inspiring the last conference I went to was – how it inspired me to want to do more creative things on the side, to make things and share them with people.

Well… I did that. Let me tell you about Work & Turn; maybe it’ll inspire you to get out there and create what you wish existed.

Work & Turn is a side project of ours; something we created with our talented designer/dev friend Kyle Fox. We made Work & Turn in order to deliver workshops & creative sessions in the design, type, and visual art fields to more people . The first one we’re putting on is a typeface design workshop called Crafting Type, which will teach attendees how to design and produce their own font.

(Sidebar: check out the Work & Turn website if you’re a web design nerd who’s into the whole responsive design thing. We had fun designing/building it)

If You Want Something, Do It

The idea for Crafting Type started while waiting for our plane to take us back home from Interlink. Jessica Hische had mentioned the Type@Cooper program in her outstanding talk, so I fired up my iPad to see what that was all about. The first thing I noticed were the litany of awesome type-focused workshops they had going on.

This made me immediately jealous. I want to go to those. But I don’t live in New York, and at some point I need to stay in Edmonton and do client work.

As far as Kyle & I could tell, there weren’t any options in Western Canada for type design workshops. So, unless we put something on, chances are I wouldn’t find myself in a type design workshop.

So we decided to put one on.

After a bit of research and some luck in finding Dave Crossland to teach the workshop – the creator of the Cantarell typeface family and current Font Consultant to the Google Web Fonts project – we built two websites and got everything in order in less than 3 weeks.

The best part? It was a blast doing it, late nights and all. People in the community are excited; we got to design & develop not one but two fun responsive sites; and we get to go to an awesome typeface design workshop in Edmonton near the end of August.

All of this came from the idea to create what you wish existed. We wanted to learn how to create our own fonts, and have that knowledge accessible to others in our community; now there’s a typeface design workshop happening in Edmonton. Maybe you don’t care about fonts (if you do, feel free to register for the workshop!). Maybe you care about something totally different that isn’t available to you. Ask yourself – what’s holding you back from obtaining it, or making it happen?

So that’s the point. If you want something, or want to do something, make it happen. The barriers to entry aren’t as rough as they might first seem.

If you do get on creating whatever you wished existed, tell us about it in the comments. And if all this talk about workshops on creating your own fonts has piqued your interest, head on over to Crafting Type and look into registering for the workshop.