Copywork & doubling my twitter following
Context & updates
12 weeks ago I quit my full-time job at Adobe and went nomadic
I’m here in San Diego to surf and see friends.
I officially landed a freelance user research project with my friend's Fintech startup, he’s launching a credit card for students, and I’m going to conduct research and 1:1 interviews to help him understand his target user better. The project pays well and helped me have some peace of mind around living off my savings.
This week I ZONED IN and got back to the all-important habit of time-blocking. Reminder to self - this is an absolutely essential way to run the day and required for peace of mind and progress towards goals.
The goal - UI Design
A primary goal of mine right now is building proper UI Design skillset. I want to be more dangerous as a product maker, and having worked with gifted designers for a few years at my previous gig at Adobe, I’m super interested in UX/UI.
As a part of that, I’m taking a course called ShiftNudge. Early in the course, I learned about copy work.
Copywork is an exercise that creatives of all kinds do to learn a craft. It’s simple - you take someone else’s great work and simply copy it. Painters replicate a famous painting. Writers re-write a famous book word for word. This is a popular approach amongst chefs (recipes) and musicians (covers), but less evident amongst other creatives. Nonetheless, I saw massive value in this exercise, both to learn design and get aquinted with Figma, the software I recently switched to for UI design.
Figma is by far the best and most popular design software, but I had only used Adobe XD, which of course the application of choice for Adobe designers.
100 new Twitter Followers
As an aspiring designer, I’ve been re-creating apps and websites, pixel for pixel.
I intend to do this every weekday for the foreseeable future and opted to also commit to sharing my learnings every day as well.
I decided I’d share this copywork to twitter in the form of threads, detailing the learnings I had.
Here was my first tweet:
Today's UI design copywork - the https://t.co/CYsFHNmPPf homepage
— Michael Henry (@michaelhenryio) July 19, 2022
Here's what I learned by copying this on desktop and mobile 👇 pic.twitter.com/W57zKlXiO2
After putting this first tweet, and sharing that tweet in the design course Slack group, two designers in the course community quote tweeted my Twitter thread - Matt, the course creator, and Ridd, a mentor within the community and overall nice guy.
Being that those two have a great following of design-inclined folks, my tweet was seen 22,080 times and resulted in my doubling my Twitter following (from 66 followers that were primarily friends, now to 174 total followers). Yay, new internet friends!
Why I’m pumped
One hundred new followers, big whoop, right?
This is a big deal to me. Here’s a few reasons why:
Connection is key - It’s awesome to be connecting with others who are interested in design. Both those just starting (like me) and those who are top-notch best of the best (like Ridd and Matt who retweeted my tweet). These connections will aid me in this new mission to become a proper UI Designer.
Helping others - I love that now I’m not only improving my skills, I’m sharing my learnings and inspiring others to also engage in copy work and advance their craft.
Accountability - with the ritual in place that I’m going to do copywork and share every weekday and the mini reward of likes on subsequent tweets, these followers will keep me accountable to this commitment. This is essential as I deal with a flurry of ideas, projects, and new goals in this new life chapter.
Onward
I’m grateful for this small win and my new commitment to stick to copywork for the foreseeable future.
Thanks for reading this update. I hope this little story has provided some inspiration or perspective for whatever you’re working toward!
