Now

Personal Updates

I'm writing this from my home in Sydney, Australia.

It's the beginning of summer in the southern hemisphere, and I recently did some hiking in the Blue Mountains, which is about 2-hour drive from the Sydney CBD.

Projects

If you're reading this, you'll notice that I created a Now page! This is my way of easing back into publishing updates and adding some incremental updates to this website. Here's what else I've been up to recently:

Together with Miscellanea Studio, we launched a new massive article/report/codex titled Back to Basics: The Hoodie Reflex, written by Marian Park. This was a months-long writing and research task, with the last few months devoted to designing and developing 70+ custom visuals and built entirely in Webflow. Congrats to Marian for launching this!

For my day-job, I am designing a new platform to detect and prevent customer churn for Upollo.ai. I also manage our marketing website and write a fair bit of content on our the Upollo Blog.

I've also started planning a new website design project for a type designer friend/colleague that I have collaborated with before. Looking forward to launching a new portfolio & type tester website in early 2025!

Learning

I've been finding LLMs such as Claude helpful when doing certain tasks, like basic coding stuff, formatting data (such as CSVs), copywriting and editing existing copywriting, and generating ideas for ads.

Learning the basics of D3.js for miscellanea.studio - we wanted to create these interactive mindmaps and this was a great way to do it. I used Claude to create a custom data schema to fit a client's requirements (e.g. accounting for custom text formatting, as well as adding a bit of text hierarchy to certain nodes).

Is it worth learning Figma Slides at this point?

Tools and Resources

I'm heads-down in Webflow at the moment. Lots of client and personal work has been taking place here.

I'm getting back into 3D printing and 3D designing. I am currently receiving an error on my Bambulab printer and need to install some replacement parts to fix it. The eventual goal is to be able to design and print my own moulds for purposes to casting objects out of wax, concrete, and so on.

At work and at home, I've also been playing around with some Marketing tools as well:

• Customer.io: I recently wrote a guide for Upollo for syncing customer Churn Scores to the Customer.io platform to aid in your outreach efforts.
• HubSpot: On a similar note, I wrote a guide for syncing Upollo's user Churn Scores to HubSpot.
• Microsoft Clarity: I use Clarity both professionally and personally. It's a great way to see user activity and figuring out were people are getting frustrated or hung up. It's a great addition to basic stuff like Google Analytics
• MailerLite: At Miscellanea Studio, we send emails using Mailerlite. We wanted something super-simple and lightweight. Over the years, I have grown tired of bloated platforms like Intercom and Mailchimp.