Articles

My name is Michelle and I’m a digital hoarder 👋

Starting a brand new hobby can be tough. Here’s how I started a new hobby from scratch.

Twitter Bookmarks Are An Underutilized Way To Grow As A Creator

This is how you can make money online as a creative in 2022

See if you can change my mind 😉

I love turning things into a game, especially things I usually procrastinate on. This type of gamification keeps me interested and motivated. It’s especially helpful on bad weeks when I can only do the bare minimum to keep myself progressing.

So many great opportunities will pass you by if you don’t look out for them. But what are signals? And how do you know which ones to follow?

Over the last year, I’ve developed a system for how I consume different types of content. This system has allowed me to build a vault of knowledge I can repurpose into articles, newsletters, tweets, and digital products.

How I get even more from the content I consume

How I repurpose my content including the tools I use

Become a better designer by scrolling through Netflix

Video games teaching you about life? 🤷‍♀️

Best books all creatives should read this year

Scheduled creative time, here’s what I learned

My entire template including code snippets

10x Your Designer To Developer Comms

Subscribe to these 7 design newsletters and you won’t be disappointed

How to show code examples on a Jekyll website

Here’s what I do to set up a Pomodoro timer in Obsidian

How I Use Obsidian Daily Notes To 10x My Creator Workflow Every Day

Learn about the things that cause you to procrastinate and get tips to overcome procrastination.

Part four in a series of posts - A Comprehensive Walkthrough Of My Obsidian Setup.

Part three in a series of posts - A Comprehensive Walkthrough Of My Obsidian Setup.

Part two in a series of posts - A Comprehensive Walkthrough Of My Obsidian Setup.

Part one in a series of posts - A Comprehensive Walkthrough Of My Obsidian Setup.

A table of contents is an invaluable component to have on longer blog posts. Learn how to add one to your Jekyll website.

In this post, I share the step-by-step process I used to create a highly effective landing page to promote my latest book.

What you can learn from Pokémon cards that will make you a better designer

The code snippet I use to add a social media share bar to my posts on my Jekyll website

The code snippet I use to add related posts to each of my posts.

Learn how a creator uses Figma to build content consistently (with examples)

Learn from my mistakes and become a successful web designer

Never be stuck for an original idea again with this system.

In this comprehensive article I would like to share with you my current Obsidian setup. I’ll be going into detail on how my vault is structured, naming conventions, tags, templates.

Character limits are used on text fields to indicate the maximum amount of characters that can be entered into that field. These components are important as they provide immediate feedback to the user when they fill in a form.

Password fields are a necessity if you’re designing a login or sign-up form for your application. As common as these types of fields are, they can be frustrating to interact with when poorly designed.

Designing an entire website can seem like a big challenge. You need to think about all the pages, the content on each page, how it’ll be designed, what colors to use; the list is pretty long.

Mind maps are a powerful tool for getting started with project planning, learning something new, or even making decisions.

Here’s how I added a related posts section to articles on my Jekyll website.

Feeling “bored” can result in a complete lack of motivation. You don’t have the drive to pick something from your list of chores. You can’t bring yourself to do anything except watch YouTube mindlessly.

Here’s how I implemented an affiliate disclaimer to specific posts or pages on my Jekyll website.

A shutdown routine is something you do at the end of your workday that tells your brain, I’m finished with work today.

As a UI Designer, you are essentially paid for your ideas. They are your greatest source of value.

It’s easy to be bombarded by things you should work on or should do. Things from work, things in your life, things you read on social media.

We all need constraints to operate effectively. In the world of creators, creative constraints allow us to focus our energy and concentration in the right place.

As one of the many people now working from home, I found the process difficult at first.

As someone that is interested in systems and workflows, I’m always curious about the tools other people use to make them more productive.

In the world of content creation, we’re always creating new things. New blog posts, new videos, podcasts, and social media posts.

The whole idea of creativity and being creative is underestimated in today’s world.

Any well-designed application should have good error messages. When I say good error messages I’m not talking about a message like “Critical Error x-299498sdkfjh”. Let’s face it, that helps no one.

Adding the estimated reading time of your article provides valuable context for readers. They can decide if they want to read your article now or bookmark it and save it for later.

How we live our lives and the systems we use to keep on top of things is always changing.

A great tip for speeding up the build time of your Jekyll blog is to make use of the incremental regeneration feature.

It can be easy to fall into the pattern of working from day to day, week to week. Finding the time and motivation to learn how to improve or become better than you were before can seem like a huge task.

If you’re looking to optimize the build time of your Jekyll blog, it’s useful to know just how long each part of the build process takes.

As I sit down to write this article, I’m not starting from scratch.

As your Jekyll blog grows in size over time, you might find that the build process takes longer to run.

I enjoy writing my articles using Markdown as it offers a lot of benefits. I’m able to write without distraction. Plus my hands never need to leave the keyboard to format what I’m writing.

A common convention for external links is that they open in a new tab. The idea behind this is that you can easily go back to the previous tab if you need to. This makes it easy for users to return to your website.

If you have read my recent post: You Learn More Effectively By Practicing, you’ll know that I’ve consciously made an effort to continue building my web development knowledge.

If you have many different post categories on your WordPress website, you might want to funnel them to different pages. This is especially important to consider if you have included each of your post categories in your navigation menu.

I recently started back into building up my web development skills. A lot has changed in the time since I last actively made an effort to advance my knowledge of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript so I needed to catch up!

I have been using Obsidian as my personal knowledge management (PKM) system for the last number of months.

I recently revised the way I use Todoist to manage my work-related tasks as a UI Designer at the company where I work.

I recently revised my content creation workflow to tie in better with my goal to develop a consistent writing habit. With that in mind, I thought this would be the perfect opportunity to share with you my simplified writing workflow for content creation.

I recently had to do some research to figure out how to properly handle disabled fields and buttons (I’m collectively calling them components). This design pattern is quite often used across my designs so I wanted to be sure I was implementing it correctly.

Our brains are always thinking and processing. If each thought was a word, we would be able to generate enough content to produce a whole book every single day.

I recently wrote about the act of continuous learning and made a case for learning from and being inspired by others.

Just because you’ve left school doesn’t mean that you should stop learning. In fact, I would argue that you should never stop learning new things.

In today’s day and age, many people can become their own boss by being a “content creator” or “knowledge worker”. The internet is full of ambitious and creative people that make their living solely online.

As someone who writes blog posts pretty consistently and as a content creator in general, I find that I end up working on a lot of the same types of tasks quite regularly.

I recently did some research into the best practices for designing modals on mobile devices. This is something we are looking to implement across our mobile apps at my job so I needed some help in understanding how these types of components work and how they’re supposed to be used.

I’ve been writing quite a bit about goals, reviews, and routines lately as a result of the new year and that’s going to continue in today’s article.

At the start of a fresh new year, or when you’re planning out the week ahead during your weekly review, it can be tempting to pile on more and more things to your to-do list.

The start of a new year brings with it the chance to review and refine our routines.

As it’s the start of a brand new year, we’re all in the throws of reflecting over the last year and setting our new goals for the year ahead.

As an avid Obsidian user, I am always curious to learn how I can get the most out of this application.

As a UI designer at the company where I work, I am often tasked with creating new designs for complex systems that manage a lot of data.

In this article, I would like to walk you through my Notion Library setup.

In today’s day and age, people are constantly changing jobs as well as changing careers. Gone are the days when we simply had one career and one job until retirement.