Making sense of it all

I spend a considerable amount of time each year trying to capture, summarise and reflect on the past.

As much as I consider myself someone constantly moving towards the next thing, I am also deeply nostalgic.

I have always been the guy with the camera. The person making family vacation videos: journaling, capturing and editing the experiences I make with friends and family.

This obsession with documenting our lives have only grown with parenthood. Now, more than ever, I feel like time is a river and I’m just cupping my hands in the water trying to save puddles of it from disappearing downstream.

One way that I have been dealing with this is by making things that help tell the story of the past year. Not surprisingly I have turned this into an exercise in product design.

Making things is my way of making sense of it all.

At the end of every year I choose 200 pictures that best tell the story of the past 12 months. Not necessarily the pretties pictures, but the ones that capture what it was all about. I then print and insert them into linen-covered tomes: yearbooks for our family. I have 14 of these now and they’re a treasure trove of memories.

For the past 6 years I have been producing a video series of recaps called ‘Everything I worked On In…’ attempting to summarise everything I have worked on in the past year: Freelance work, product launches, silly side projects and everything in between.

These formats, if you will, help me solidify my nostalgia into tangible things. They’re very time consuming for me to produce. Time that could have been spent building new things (or making new experiences) but I hold on to them dearly.

Making these things is perhaps my way of anchoring an otherwise sprinting mind, always hungry for the horizon. A therapeutic exercise, forcing me to take stock. To reflect. To be grateful for the things that worked out and to learn from the things that didn’t.

I just posted the ‘Everything I Worked On In 2022’.

Give it a watch and maybe it’ll inspire you to make something.

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🔦 Highlights

Everything I Worked On In 2022

10 minutes jampacked with pixels and experiences from a year with both ups and downs.

Creativity Juice

I was considering writing a separate email about this at one point, because I’m so damn proud, but I designed the label for a beer! Total bucket list item for me. I collaborated with my favourite brewery in Denmark on my favourite beer type. They still have some beers and t-shirts left from the launch. (They only ship to Denmark though).

🔖 Use the code JUICE for 20% off at Alefarm

Michael Flarup @flarup

Releasing a beer today 😍

💚 Likes

• Speaking of printing pictures, I have been very happy with the Canon Selphy CP1300 for those classic 15x10cm photo prints. These are the ones I use in my yearbooks. For anything bigger I use my Canon Pixma-Pro 200.

• Dan Mumford is an absolutely brilliant illustrator. Because of our mutual affiliation with Adobe, I have gotten to know him at our many speaking engagements. I have a lot of his art and hung one of my favourite pieces of his the other day.

• I’m going to need this whole vibe back in design: Illustrator ‘88 promotional instruction video.

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Thank you for reading this email. I’m still finding my newsletter-legs, so to speak, and would love to hear what you think.

Please leave a comment or drop me a line on twitter.

Sincerely,
Michael