Thoughts about the challenge and my website

A paid subscribers post, today for everyone!

Note: this post is a paid post I decided to send to everyone, also free subscribers, so you can see what the paid Tuesday post is about: process, doubts, lettering, business and font testing for the most of it. This is not always that long, this is not every Tuesday, but at least, you can see the kind of benefit you have when you become a paid subscriber to my publication. I hope you like it.

Hello dear supporters,

The last weeks have been quite crazy here as my wife had a running accident and broke her leg at different points and ligaments. The result is she cannot move almost at all. So I became in charge of everything and it is tough.

It is tough but I am really happy I decided to go (almost) full passive income and make money from my products because it would be impossible to make projects with short deadlines right now. And I say almost full passive income because I continue to help one or two friends in their business. But yes, this would be impossible for me to manage everything. And it comforts me to continue to do the same. My family needs me right now on that kind of “mission” for minimum 8/10 weeks but in general, we could not function as a family if we would work both full time, and even worse if we were both employees. Maybe that discussion talks to some of you :)

So it is difficult right now to find time to move on with my work but surprisingly, it is still functioning and I still made things lately, like doing that 30 days of fonts challenge and start selling my “Sketch for depression” print.

About the challenge

It started well and then numbers dropped really down. I mean, Instagram just shows my posts to max 2000 people who follow me. I have 37000 followers. I tried to make a reel but numbers were not much better. My content and the way I show it does not seem to please the algorithm. But after a few days of frustration, I refocused and re-said to myself that it was not where I should concentrate my energy (here is where my energy needs to go). But I like posting stuff so I don’t see myself stopping posting there.

I changed something from the initial plan though: I started re-doing some visuals to fit more with my style. I just finished a really good book, called “Your first 100”.

And that books reflects on some drawbacks of my work. And one of them is that people are “following” me for my style, for my personality. So what I should do is communicate and show work around my style, and not things that don’t really say anything to me. And when I look at numbers on my challenge, as soon as I show visuals of packaging or advertising with a sneaker for example, the views and engagement are near to zero. I am not here to sell or to please everybody with my work. I could do that, but this is not my goal. I really want to focus on what I know well, what I like to do and what people are here for.

So I started doing some visuals with retro/vintage, mid modern illustration and realised quickly how cool my fonts go well with it. It may sounds bizarre to say that but I always focused on many ways to display my fonts, trying to find other way to showcase them, when the style they look the best at, is my own style. Here is my favourite visual so far, using Farandole, and to me this is “wow this font fits so good the purpose!”.

So I tried everyday to create something new with my style and my fonts. Another good example to me is the use of Cuatro in a psychedelic lettering. I love psyche but I did not design Cuatro thinking totally at that style. And when I started to stretch it, I was so amazed I could do this with my own font haha :D Bizarre again right? So here the result you may have seen on Instagram:

And you know what? This is on these shots that I made some sales and that I had the more visibility.

Focus on what you do best.

So now, everyday I check at my stock of visuals I prepared before the challenge but I stay also aware of good ideas I could have to create new visuals. And this is a lot of fun. I see here again that challenges bring me so much fun and joy. On Friday, I will talk more in details about that and the possible idea of doing a “30 days of lettering” challenge with some of the people who are following me. So stay tuned :)

About the print sale

The launch on the newsletter was pretty good to me. I sold 5 posters in the 2 hours after the newsletter came out. And today I will start communicating on social medias. Engagement there is usually pretty low but we will see. And I hired my daughter, a young teenager who is really good at making videos to help me create some reels on Instagram. So we will see how it goes.

But this business is a long term project. I actually plan to create also small prints for 10€. I understand not everyone can spend 40€ + transport costs. But I want to make possible to buy my art to everyone. This is also something I learned in the book I mention above.

I plan to move my website

Last news of the day. I hate WordPress. And I have been a WordPress dev for 10 years. But having to manage with Woocommerce, Elementor and 20 other plugins is really a nightmare. I moved back to WP to be able to sell fonts with every variant or specificity. Also I wanted people to try my fonts on my website. But at the end, this is a lot of work for me and I want to focus on my art. So, during the summer, I will go back to Squarespace and hire a dev for custom options. Also, I will essentially build a shop and not have my folio on the homepage. I really want to simplify my website so people find my products easily and directly. I would also like to increase visits from Google engine for example. I am really looking forward to this task. It is really exciting. I always looked at Lisa Congdon’s website which I find amazing and thought that maybe one day I could build something similar. I think now is the time.

This is it for today. See you on Friday for a reflection on challenges and why I am thinking of launching a new one for others soon :)

Take care,

Francis