In Horoma's Head 15
Hi everyone,
Time for a little heads up of what's been on for March. While this month hasn't been packed with projects (I purposefully took only one project for this month to focus on development and other stuff instead), it still had its lot of news and breakthrough that I sure wouldn't have had if I didn't have this downtime.
So, what's up?
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The World of Coffee Business 🍩☕ 👔
I recently stumbled upon Ali Abdaal's second channel focusing on conversations and interview rather than productivity hacks. To be perfectly honest, I'm not a huge fan of his original YT channel, but I do love interviews and open discussions, and he recently invited James Hoffman, who's also another big Youtuber (but first and foremost a coffee expert running Square Mile Roastery).
In this almost 2-hour long interview we get a lot of valuable advice on business management, brick and mortar business operations, coffee in general, revenue streams, the stupidity of the grinding motto, and many more topics.
So I wholeheartedly recommend listening to this episode that you can find here :)
The World of Focus switching and Recovery 👨⚕️🥼🩺
As I mentioned in the intro, this month was about completely different tasks than my day to day usuals. And one thing I tend to completely underestimate, even after all this time doing it, is the time I take to recover from long stretches of work.
It is fun because when you're in the midst of it, you don't necessarily notice how tired your brain is because when making images is just second nature, you can do it almost on autopilot (although you definitely don't want to do that).
But as soon as you really stop working on a specific set of tasks (say, creating images) and now need to work on a completely different typology of tasks (say refine a masterclass), you then notice all the more clearly how much you actually were tired, and what you think would take 1 or 2 days to adjust ends up taking a whole week before you can produce decent results.
I think the main drawback of not working physical jobs, is that psychological fatigue is less visible, but it can really hinder your ability to function properly if you don't pay enough attention to it.
One thing I know for sure, is that I'll keep forgetting about it, and that next time I do this type of switch, I'll still be amazed at how long it takes me to adapt to the new task. Again.
The World of Workflow 🕹🖥📊
For the past couple of years I've been mainly focusing on refining and improving my process regarding client management and project handling. How to tackle a brief, generate creative ideas and sell them to my clients. While this definitely is the most important aspect clients are paying for, the technical and artistic aspect was left slightly on the side. It doesn't mean that my images are less good than they were - they are actually much better while being a bit more minimalist I think - but the growth in "intent" that I've had is a bit lacking in the growth of technical aspect. Everything is clean, but to my eyes it's lacking a little something to make me like them again.
So in the next couple of months, or let's say 6 months to be sure, I'll start experimenting a bit more heavily by incorporating back a bit more Photoshop work in my images which lately tended to rely almost entirely on 3D work. I need this sort of "grain of reality" back into my images, whether for foregrounds, backgrounds, vegetations, some extra texturing, etc.
We'll see how all this goes!
The world of The Invincible Freelancer 📚🖌🎨
Little fun story, that lead to a very specific realisation, that will eventually lead to a proper Youtube video on the topic.
While I only took a single contract this month, this one wasn't without any obstacles. One in particular was the absence of electricity at my home the day before the deadline. Yep. Not cool.
This is a fun topic because being sort of a "digital nomad" I tended to optimize a lot of aspects of my physical gear in order to make sure that I would always be operational (Dropbox being probably the thing making the biggest difference on the matter). But the absence of electricity never occured to me as a possibility.
Since this was a really bothering and stressful experience (I still managed to finish all the images in time fortunately), I spent the following days putting together the "Invincible Freelancer Setup" (name is a work in progress) and have started to reach something that I think works nicely. Just need to make the small investments to set it all up, test it for a bit, and then I'll work on the video to talk about it.
The World of AI 🥼🖥💻
I was recently watching a zoom conversations hosted by some architecture university I forgot the name of (sorry about that) where the topic was about AI in architecture. Interesting topic... that I won't tackle at all. But in the introduction, the host mentioned a documentary available on Youtube for free called AlphaGo - The Movie.
I was already familiar with the story of AlphaGo, the work of Google/Alphabet on AI, the story of DeepBlue and DeepMind, but this documentary really managed to put a lot of emotion and humanity and philosophical complexity in this topic in a masterful way.
Definitely a must watch whether you care about the subject or not I think. And if you've seen it already, you should rewatch it, as I will later today ;)
The World of Color Palettes and Webdesign 🖥🖼🎨
On a much softer note, here is a very well designed website that uses machine learning to generate entire websites, visual identities and more broadly color palettes. The design of each options and templates is already very cool, but seeing all these options to generate color options that simply work is amazing and, well, potentially very useful if you're thinking of doing some flyers or a new website for instance.
The world of Horoma 2.0 📈📊👨🎓👩🏫👩🏭
Last week I was away on a little business trip and also took the opportunity to meet up with a friend who happens to also run an archviz studio. But like, an actual studio, with employeeeeees. Not my kind of studio ran alone in the dark. And interestingly, this time, it did strike a chord to hear about building a company, whereas for the past years I only saw the idea of growing equaling a surplus of issues and headaches.
I'm still pondering on all this, but the main differences in my mind right now I think are three-fold :
- I don't want to grow my studio to take on bigger clients, or bigger contracts, but to diversify and explore completely new topics and subjects (still related to archviz or architecture somehow)
- I still love and enjoy (most of) what I do, but the frustration of the lack of time is also growing more and more. Struggling to allocate time for my course has been a huge disappointment for me for instance. Being close to a new milestone but needing a lot of extra time just because you're working alone on it is annoying.
- I have people in mind that I actively would want to work with. So finding the right fit is not even necessary. At that stage I would just need to have a conversation with each of them and see what they think.
I've always been a very curious person and not being able to dedicate enough time to those other topics is starting to take a toll on me.
I think also that growing a company is hard when you start from zero and this is also why it must have seem very daunting to me back when I started. But once everything is already in place, that old clients are coming back and new ones are coming in, it seems like an easier step to organize things a bit differently in order to work on some other things. It also starts to feel like a missed opportunity not to do so.
So will I do it?
Well, I'll keep on thinking about it a bit more, and will get in touch with the couple of people that I'm thinking about to help me with this new phase. And depending on what they think, maybe we'll come up with something that can be a first step for Horoma to grow a little.
The one thing I want to avoid, is to just grow the studio "because that's what people do". I have zero economical incentive to do so. I have no ego to feed either. But I do start to feel that hunger for collaboration, and more properly allocated time.
So we'll see where this leads us.
And on this hopeful note, I will end this little newsletter for the month.
If you find this utterly boring and useless, please let me know before unsubscribing 🎀. If on the other hand you do like it, then I'm glad, and feel free to share it with your archviz pals that would maybe like it too by sending them here : https://www.horoma.net/newsletter-subscription
Thank you
All the best for the upcoming month!
Cheers
Simon