I’ve been writing Honeycode for four years now. I started this blog as a way of sharing behind-the-scenes information about my career in advertising.
My blog has become a place where I enjoy expressing my opinion on topics that interest me, and it’s also allowed me to meet some incredibly talented people in the industry.
I’ve done my best to keep this blog looking fresh and up-to-date. I hope you enjoy it!
I’m sure you’ve heard the term “creative,” but I think you might be mistaken what that means. There are a bunch of different disciplines in advertising, and one of them is called “Creative,” and that’s the group (usually two people, but not always) who come up with the ideas that we sell to clients.
You could be an art director or a copywriter, which are the two core disciplines for coming up with ads. You could also be a creative director, which is basically managing the creative department of an agency. Or you could be a strategist, which is a separate discipline that has more to do with planning how we’re going to reach your target audience, rather than how we’re going to talk to him/her.
That said, all those disciplines are kind of combined in one person if you’re working at a small agency or as a freelancer. If you want to get into advertising as a freelancer or help build up a small agency, you should probably start off by being an art director and copywriter in one person.
I started my career in advertising when I was 23 years old. I had just graduated from university and landed a job as a copywriter at a big agency in London.
My first day on the job was overwhelming and exciting. There were so many opportunities to learn new skills and make interesting projects. I was also thrilled to meet people who worked for some of the best brands in the world.
The first thing that struck me was how experienced everyone around me seemed. Everyone was in their mid-30s, while I was only 23 at the time. It felt like I didn’t belong there, but after a few weeks, I got used to it.
Next, I was impressed by how many things people knew about the brands they were working on, even though they had never worked with them before. It felt like they had lived and breathed those brands for years and knew everything there is to know about them.
Finally, I noticed how fast people worked and how many projects they could work on at the same time without getting burned out or stressed out.
I wanted to have all those things too: experience, knowledge of the industry and speed of delivery. But there were two problems:
1) I wasn’t as experienced as everyone else
I am a digital craftsman, I have been working as a designer in the advertising industry for more than 10 years.
I realized that even though I worked with some amazing creative people, there was something missing from my job. It was like we were consistently designing beautiful products that no one wanted to buy.
Maybe it was because I had this entrepreneurial itch, but I wanted to build my own products and services that people actually want to buy. So I decided to quit my job and start working on the side project called Honeycode.
I will do my best to share everything I learn along the way — everything from marketing and design tips, to resources that have helped me get started with product development.
I am not sure if this is the right place to ask but I have a question regarding the emails.
I have my email address on my website and that’s how agencies usually contact me. So far I’ve been receiving 3-5 emails per day (most of them are just links to portfolios/websites and they’re asking if we’re interested in collaborating).
I have a couple of questions:
1) How do you handle these emails? Do you reply to all of them or just to some? And how long does it take for you to reply?
2) What do you think about the ones who send you a link to their portfolio/website with no specific question? I’m not sure what could be the right answer here. Should I just say that we’re not interested?
3) If you reply, what do you usually write? Is there a standard email template?
Do you have any tips on this matter and maybe some examples of the emails that worked well for you.
I’ve been working on my first big visual project for a while now. It’s been a fun and interesting experience, but I’ve also made plenty of mistakes along the way. I thought it might be helpful to share some of these mistakes with you guys in a blog post.
I have a friend who runs his own business selling honey. He asked me if I would design some packaging for him, and I thought it would be good practice for me as well as something that would help him out. I immediately said yes, because I love honey!
I started by researching different types of packaging for honey, and everything I found seemed to be very simple and clean. They were all just plain white boxes with simple illustrations of bees on them. The only thing that made them stand out was the color of the honey inside the box. So I decided to go with a similar style for this project, because it fit well with the product and its target audience: people who like honey!
I started by designing some simple illustrations using Adobe Illustrator program (which is amazing!). These are easy tools to use so they’re perfect if you’re just starting out or don’t have any previous design experience like me! After doing some sketches on paper first though so I could get an
September 24th, 2013
I had the pleasure of interviewing a professional software engineer. He is an alum of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and has worked on a wide variety of projects throughout his career including: video games, web applications, and computer simulations.
He is currently working on Honeycode, a programming language that is designed to be easily understood by non-programmers. His experience in the industry has been very interesting and he was kind enough to share some of it with me.
First, I asked him about his background and how he started out in the industry. He said that it was through a college course that introduced him to programming. After getting a degree in computer science, he spent the next four years working for a video game company where he created small simulations for use in educational programs.
After that, he moved on to a position at Google where he worked on web applications that are still used internally by Google today. Next came an opportunity to work at Microsoft as part of their Windows team where he developed software for use within Microsoft Office programs like Excel and Word.
From there he went to Amazon as part of their advertising group where he worked on developing tools for advertisers looking to reach customers based off data collected from online shopping