Sarah Parmenter, a web and UI designer.

I’m sure everyone can remember a time in their life when they have sat awake worrying. As a freelancer, you will probably find yourself doing this a lot. I worry about whether I’ve done everything I should that day, whether I’ve responded to certain emails, and work deadlines that might be in front of me. Freelancing can certainly be a rewarding experience but along with these rewards comes the natural insomnia that can occur.

You’re probably going to think I’m completely crackers, but I’ve been combatting this insomnia pretty well for the last 5 years, due to a little mind trick I was taught. It actually allows your body and mind to shut down and allow you to sleep.

The not so crackers part is that it was actually taught to me by a friend who spent a small fortune on a psychiatrist to help her insomniac son sleep. There were various steps to the programme, one included memorising chess pieces and patterns, I never understood this and so bypassed that particular “remedy”.

The one that interested me is the one I’m about to share with you. Bear with me, it does sound insane and a bit hippy-ish but I’ve always found, it works.

You are to imagine yourself in a small circular room, high above the trees. In the middle of this circular room is a bed, whatever you imagine to be the most comfy bed in the world. You are to imagine the pillows, the duvet and the mattress, how they feel, how they are dressed and the colour of the sheets. Inside the bed is someone that you would normally draw comfort from, such as a girlfriend/boyfriend or wife/husband. If the person you would draw comfort from, wouldn’t necessarily share a bed with you, you are to imagine a chair in the corner of the room, with this person sitting reading a paper, and watching over you.

Around the room are 5 doors, each heavier and thicker than the last. In each door is a lock and a large key. You are to start at door number one, place your thoughts behind the door, shut it and lock the door, imagine the weight of the key and hear the “clunk” of the lock. Same method with doors, 2,3, and 4 – by the time you get to number five, you save this for ‘heavy stuff’, such as debt, health of a family member or anything else that is pretty serious and stopping you from sleeping. You repeat the method above, lock the door and walk towards your super comfy bed and get in.

Each time you want to think about any of the thoughts you locked away, you confront yourself with the image of the locked door, a door you can’t get past until morning, nothing is accessible once you have locked it away.

You’ll find you’ll get better at not accessing the thoughts and instead confronting yourself with the locked door image, it does take practise and you’ll get quicker at “locking” everything away the more you do it.

I almost go through the above process, out of habit now. The room I imagine is just as familiar to me as my actual bedroom. It helps me to compartmentalise my thoughts and tell my brain it’s “ok” to leave it until the morning. It also allows me to sleep better, quicker and be more creative the next day.

If you can get past feeling a bit daft, and the whole process being a little silly, you might just find sleep finds you a little easier.

I thought I’d give everyone a bit of a helping hand and point you in the right direction (or the right direction to point friends and family to) for Geeky Christmas presents of 2010. Some of them have Cyber Monday deals and some have only one available, especially those listed on Etsy, so be sure to act fast if you find something you fancy.

NOTE: There’s no affiliate links, I’m not making any money from any of the gifts listed below, it’s just stuff I like that I’ve found over the weekend and collated just for you.

So here goes…

UpStand, Iconic Aluminium iPad Stand

£50/$80
Beautifully designed sturdy iPad stand, finished in rubber to hold it firmly in place. Also compatible with most iPad cases too.

Browser Sketch Pad

$12.95
Link to a site selling a similar thing but in the UK (save on postage)
Sketch website and UI ideas to your hearts content, also available as iPhone and iPad versions.

ONLY 3 LEFT – Pixel Christmas Cards

Also try their Pixel Gift Tags.

8Faces Magazine – Great stocking filler!

£8
For anyone interested in Typography or just generally enjoys reading about some of the best font designers in the world, this magazine would make a great stocking filler and dispatched in time for Christmas.

Daily Drop Cap Letterpress Wall Print

$225
Know someone who loves Typography? With only 75 in existence, this limited edition letterpress print would be a great addition to any budding typographers office wall.

Wooden ‘Think’ sign

£30/$46
I purchased a ‘Geek’ one of these the other day and featured it on my blog. I believe myself and another fellow Twitterer got the last of the geek ones, but may be worth asking if this is the word you would prefer? They’ve got tons of other great stuff in their Etsy shop and 15% off until Cyber Monday.

Hardboiled Web Design

£32.00
Mum’s, Dad’s, listen up. If you think your son/daughter “tinkers” around on the internet all day – just buy this book, it’s going down in history as a “must have” for the bookshelf.

BookBook Macbook Case

$79.99-$99.99
A hardback original looking leather case to carry your Macbook Pro around in.

Farmville Cake Toppers

£8/$11
Know someone who loves Farmville? Let’s face it, we all do. Treat them to some Farmville Cake Toppers on Christmas Day and maybe they will finally stop trying to send you a bale of hay and a stray cow.

Day Ruining Notepads

$25.00
Know someone who likes to moan about what trouble their clients have caused them today? Order up some of Jessica Hische’s fabulous (letterpress cover) Day Ruining Notepads.

Geek Pillows

From £13
For the soft-furnishing of your office, this shop has geek pillows to suit every taste.

Facebook ‘Like’ Necklace

$49.00 For the Facebook addict in your family.

Wooden Laptop Case

At just over £200/$320 it’s expensive, but it’s beautiful, enough said.

iPhone & iPad Movie Peg – Great Stocking Filler

from £4.99 – 20% ends Monday 29th November
Brendan gave me one of these at FOWD London this year and it’s absolutely brilliant for watching films on the go, anywhere that has those tiny fold out tray tables this little gadget really comes into its own, allowing you to sit back and comfortably watch anything you like.

Moo Mosaic Frame

£16.99
Position your MiniMoo Cards to make the perfect arrangement, portrait or landscape.

Limited Edition Pac-Man Moleskines

£24.95 – use the code GEEKUP for 10% off too
Each notebook cover is printed with pixelated imagery depicting the game that includes Pac-Man, ghost characters, fruit imagery. It also contains some mini-stickers featuring icons from the game. All contained neatly in the hard card box sleeve.

A Book Apart – CSS3 For Web Designers

$18 (Paperback)
You can’t go wrong with any of the books in this series actually, HTML5 For Web Designers is also an excellent choice. Great stocking filler for the geek in your life.

Hard Graft Laptop Bag

$389
Absolutely stunning italian made laptop bag from the people at Hard Graft.

24 Ways Annual 2010 – Note: Delivered after Christmas

£8/$12
24 ways is the advent calendar for web geeks. Each day throughout December a daily dose of web design and development goodness is published to bring a little Christmas cheer with all proceeds going to Unicef.

2011 Time Travellers Calendar – Great Stocking Filler!

$20
This calendar takes 95 time travel occurrences and places them on a single timeline. Watch thousands of years of time travel take place over the course of 12 months!

Nabaztag Rabbit

£54
I desperately want one of these cute little guys – set it up for all sorts of fun and explained far better on their website.

If there’s anything else you feel should be featured here, please post it in the comments and I’ll add if appropriate!

I found this whilst nosing around a shop on Etsy today and instantly ordered one for my office. They also have a variety of other words available and in lots of colours. Can’t wait for mine to arrive.

If you get in quick, they have a 15% off sale from Black Friday – Cyber Monday.

The You Know Who website has been a real labour of love since January. We all know how it gets, you get busy with client stuff and you have to fit your own bits and pieces around downtime or weekends.

The old site was in need of a massive overhaul, and I wasn’t happy with the logo either. I went through lots of logo iterations before I finally realised, Candy Script and I had to call it a day. It is a great font, but it just wasn’t portraying the right kind of feel for me.

N.B. I’m eternally thankful to that little font though, as bizarrely, it’s what put me in touch with Carsonified all those years ago. Lots of people commented on how both of our logos used similar fonts, infact they used the same font and it was by pure coincidence, however, it put Carsonified on my radar and I’ve been friends with them ever since.

You Know Who has come a long way since I started the studio in 2003. The first logo we had was a mixture of Kabel bold and light with a quirky slanted question mark. It was fine, it did us well for a few years and was recognisable. Then in 2007, we rebranded to get rid of that awful slanted question mark that caused so many layout problems, and went to Candy Script with a little bit of customisation in Illustrator. In 2009 I began to feel unhappy with this too, I realised that with a quirky name such as “You Know Who” you can’t go too serious but I did feel the need to step it up a gear, which is the logo you now see today. It’s worlds apart from what we’ve had before and I love it.

Tackling the website was an entirely different hurdle, time constraints were mainly the problem for me as I just never seemed to have enough time to sit down and get anything finished, and by the time I did – I didn’t like what I had done before.

Over many evenings and weekends, I actually got the new site to 80% finished and realised that it wasn’t very me. Despite the studio being made up of a select group of freelancers who I use again and again on specific projects, the studio has my name very much associated with it, and I wanted it to reflect some of my personality too, which the design before the one you see today, just wasn’t doing. It was busy, it seemed a little generic and not worlds apart from the site I was trying to update. I left it brewing in my “websites” folder, mulled it over and got married.

Whilst on honeymoon, we went to a beautiful restaurant in Hollywood called Dominicks – as we were eating I noticed a lovely postcard slipped behind the bottle of wine. I instantly fell in love with it and decided to use it as inspiration for my new site design.

I know the vintage thing is very “in” right now, but I have a genuine love for everything like that, my house, especially my office, is very shabby chic/vintage and it made complete sense to make my online “house” reflect a bit of who I am and what I love. I decided to roll with it. Some might say, the clash of vintage with iOS4 and bang up to date technology, would be a weird pairing, they would probably be right, but what is the point of being cookie cutter and making the site another Apple-looking rip off?

So, £200 worth of vintage Getty stock photographs later, I was inspired, happy and making more progress than I had done all year. I want the site to have personality, but be professional. I also wanted to provide as much information for new clients as possible as well as giving them a feel for how I work and what to expect. I also needed to get various other bits into my “about” section and just neaten that up a whole lot.

The same went for the portfolio. I personally prefer portfolios where I don’t have to click from lots of thumbnails into individual images, I like to get a feel for a portfolio as a whole and so decided to stick with the single page format that I had previously.

Of course, the whole backbone to the site is ExpressionEngine, something I’ve been learning on the fly but have always been exceptionally happy with. ExpressionEngine requires a different type of coding to regular HTML/CSS in the form of lots of curly brackets sprinkled amongst your code. These curly brackets are pulling in all the data on the homepage, the portfolio, speaking gigs and reading material in date order, so the newest stuff always gets pushed to the front, without me having to touch any of the HTML/CSS templates I have designed. This is great for keeping your site up to date when you have a spare 5 minutes.

Whilst looking at typography for the site, I had my sights set on FF Dagny via Typekit and whilst listening to The Big Web Show (Episode 18) one week, they featured Roger Black from WebType who have a long standing favourite of mine, ITC Franklin Condensed, which went perfectly with the vintage theme. I dabbled with Serif fonts for the main body but ultimately went with a Sans Serif because it looked neater on the page and, in my opinion, worked better, especially for some of the smaller elements of the page.

The site is by no means finished, I’ve still got iPad and iPhone specific versions to get sorted, but it’s a lot easier when there is already a live version to work from. I also have some work to do in ie6 & 7 as there are some bugs in there, but since they make up less than 0.6% of my user base, I felt I could launch without initially worrying too much.

When I got halfway through planning my wedding I had the great idea to take the entirety of September off, as our wedding was on the 10th. That way, I would give myself, and my clients, enough time to prepare for my departure the entirety of September.

The plan, didn’t go to plan, instead I ended up probably the most stressed out I have ever been in my life, I would go as far to say I was on the verge of a meltdown, I wasn’t coping with everyday tasks such as doing the washing or making decisions about dinner, I was crying all the time and simply because my job was causing more stress than I ever imagined possible.

It actually wasn’t my job, it boiled down to two clients, the rest were being absolutely brilliant. My friends Colly and Dan Rubin, gave me some great advice and enabled me to see things a lot clearer, I had to be firmer and perhaps have some awkward conversations with the clients in question, but doing nothing wasn’t an option. I completely played down to everyone at that time just how bad things had got in my head, probably even to Colly and Dan, but at home, my poor husband-to-be had to one day deal with a proper girly meltdown, while I was holding a very large kitchen knife, chopping a carrot, and wailing about an HTML/CSS problem that I was finding hard to solve but normally would have done in two seconds. Looking back on it, it was pretty funny actually but hindsight is a wonderful thing.

So, after being away for a month with surprisingly little fallout, I thought I’d share a few things that calmed me down and have since sorted me out, being away for a long time gave me real perspective to see what was stressing me out in my work life and what I could do in the future to prevent me from having another meltdown.

• Tell clients far in advance when you are going away. By far in advance I mean, like by a month, or more if you can. I gave mine 3 weeks notice and was still dealing with tons of last minute requests.
• Keep a clean and tidy workspace. Seems simple but before the wedding, my workspace was cluttered with various things but “clutter” was just what it was, it’s hard when you work from home to keep that line between the two things clean, but ultimately, it will stress you out if your working environment isn’t in order (which mine still isn’t, a job for tomorrow!)
• There is such a thing as being too connected. While I was in America I had an AT&T sim, I replaced my o2 sim card with the American one and in an instant, all my ties and worries to England were cut and there was nothing anyone could do about it, it was my honeymoon after all. I then began to realise, back home I have the office line, Skype, Adium, Twitter, my mobile and Facebook chat (in Adium) to contend with, this is far to much distraction in one place. Before I left, my clients had multiple channels upon which to get me, just having the dings, pings and bongs every 5 minutes was stressing me out. I’ll be limiting myself in the future and might even go as far as to change my mobile, as on a personal front, my mobile is now getting spammed with various call centres and SMS’s in the middle of the night.
• Have the realisation, nothing is that important. I made a deal with myself that nothing and no one was going to ruin the week before my wedding, I plan to be married for life and therefore this would be my only opportunity to enjoy the build up. In my head I went as far as saying I would happily loose the clients that were causing me stress in a barter for one of the most important times of my life. When my Grandfather passed away and I took a week off work (bearing in mind, I normally work 50 weeks a year!) a client decided to tell me exactly what they thought of me taking time off – that person is no longer a client. Realise that some things should always come first and are far more important.
• Plan and schedule for when you come back. So everyone dreads the post holiday inbox huh? I’ll admit, I had my iPad on me and free Wi-Fi in every hotel we visited, I was checking my emails as I went along but left them all for downloading when I was back. I switched the iMac on and I had 1008 messages from nearly 20 days away, not too bad. Out of that 1008 messages, 71 need responding to. Holiday inboxes are not as bad as you think.Before I left, I also made a note of anyone that contacted me recently and needed responding to when I got back, I had so much faith in myself that “I would remember” but ultimately, now I’m back, I haven’t and it has saved me time and stress trawling back on email conversations. I just made a note in “The Hit List” and now have a tidy list to refer back to, complete with email addresses. I also scheduled all my work in iCal from the 4th of October to give myself two days to readjust to the time difference, sort emails and admin tasks before starting work again.
• Take time off. If I go downstairs and turn the TV on in the middle of the day, I feel like a naughty school girl bunking off school, I am always at my desk, morning noon and often, nights. Being away for a month has made me realise that as long as I get my work done, I need to give myself more of a normal work/life balance, walk the dog daily, get fresh air and not have a rigid 9-5 timetable when I’m more than likely working 3-4 hours in the evening too, but above all – to not feel guilty about taking time off as in this creative industry, you really do need time away from the screen to find inspiration in everyday life, and also feel like a human being and not a machine.

I think I’ve just summed it all up myself, I had started to feel like a creative machine rather than Sarah and thankfully had the realisation myself before it got too bad.

I know not everyone is fortunate enough to have a month long holiday, for whatever reason, so I hope me writing down what helped me, will also help you, one day.

NB. I am fully sane, blissfully de-stressed, back to my former self and accepting work from Mid-November January.
(that’s a whole other blog post!)