What's coming in 2024
YouTube channel, Notion template and a course
Hi, I’m Maureen and I work as a product designer and design content creator. The Cursor Magazine is my online publication on design, workshop facilitation and career.
I usually don’t start the year with big new goals, but rather see the new year as a fresh start to pick up some habits I’ve developed over the past years and that I might have lost touch with. However, this year I’ve planned quite some big things.
This year will be the year that I want to take my content creation even further.
I’ve been sharing design content now for almost 4 years - way longer than I ever imagined and thought I was capable of. In those four years I’ve spent many, many hours on creating and sharing content for free. This was always very important to me. It’s been my mission to make design knowledge accessible to as many people as possible. I was very reluctant to monetise this “hobby”. Partly because I wasn’t sure if my content was worth it paying for, partly because I do not believe in monetising your life’s passions.
However, this year I’ll be bringing out content that will cost some money. This is a big step for me and I hope it will land well with all of you.
Bringing out a course… but it’s not a design course.
To start with the most exciting thing - I’m creating a course for you all!
This has been cooking for a while but moving countries and starting a new job took my focus for the past year. Now I’m returning to this project.
Hint: it will not be a design course. I already did that last year.1
This course I’m bringing out together with my dear friend Calum Russell and will focus on Personal Branding for Designers.
This course if perfect for you if..
You are introverted and not sure how to build a network that can expose you to new career opportunities
You’re looking to start sharing content online in 2024 but you have no clue where to begin
Currently a rough cut is done and I’m going through everything to leave notes and check how to make the course as valuable as possible.
Start my own YouTube channel
In the past years I’ve spend a lot of time on creating content for Instagram. This exposed me to amazing career opportunities and lifetime friendships.
However, slowly but surely the drive to share content on Instagram has been replaced by dread. I’ve felt the pressure to continue posting even though the passion is gone for a while now. The pressure to keep on growing - even though there is no goal outside of growth itself. The pressure to create content that does not satisfy me, but is made for engagement rates and trends. This very newsletter grew out of that search for design content that was made for thoughtful discussion, not mindless consumption.
I’ve been looking for a platform that gives me that creative spark again and even though I’m way late to the game, I would love to give YouTube a chance.
The past years I’ve collaborated intensely with CareerFoundry to create videos for their YouTube channel. Now I’m excited to start creating videos on my own and learn all the skills that come with that: video editing, marketing and storytelling.
The focus of my YouTube channel will be career, design and productivity tools which brings me to the next point…
Dabbling into digital products
I’ve been a big fan of Notion for years now. Everything in my life is organised in Notion:
Weekly planner
Career goals
Recipes
Workouts
Life admin
In those years of heavy usage, I’ve learned how to build templates that are easy to use and has helped me stay productive. I’m now working on a making of couple of those templates available to you.
The first ones will focus on UX Portfolios and UX Resources. These templates will available for the price of a coffee (this allows me to cover the costs of a Notion Plus plan.) I’ll let you know when I start selling these templates.
Public speaking and facilitation
This year I want to practice my public speaking and facilitation skills even more and I would love to do a talk at a conference. If you’re hosting a design even or conference and you’re looking for speakers, please do reach out to me by replying to this email or leaving a comment below.
Here are some of the topics I’m especially excited about:
Personal Branding for designers
Careerswitching
Careergrowth
Workshop facilitation
💎 Things I enjoyed this month
Notes on Job Hopping via The Woke Salaryman
This comic is a very insightful post on the pros and cons on job-hopping. As someone who has had 4 jobs in 5 years, I could be considered a ‘jobhopper’. Seeing this post made me feel reassured about my careerpath so far.
When I started working at Miro I was asked to write a welcome letter to the team. Instead I decided to write a ‘manual of me’ - something I’ve seen popping up on my LinkedIn feed and I really liked the idea of it. A ‘manual of me’ basically lines out who you are, your strengths and work habits and how you like to work with others.
In this post that Vitaly Friedman shared you will find more resources for this tool: Vitaly Friedman’s post of Manual of Me
ChatGPT career generator by Rita ABC
Over the past years I’ve received many questions regarding design careers. What job is right for me? Should I learn skill X,Y or Z? Is it better to learn data or design? This custom ChatGPT by Rita ABC can help you generate jobs and get answers to these questions and more.
For the German speakers among you, I’ve already partnered with LinkedIn to bring out a Figma Foundations course last year. In case you missed that, head over to LinkedIn Learning to enroll for free or read my newsletter update on it.
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Would love to get a notion template for the life dashboard, been looking for something like this!