Don't you hate when you go from having no work to then having way too much work and it starts pilling up on you? That was November for me.

Work

In November I continued working on my current freelance project - the property listings website I am re-designing. Most of the design work is finished - the only thing I have left to design is the Filter Results interface - my first idea didn't work. But I decided to pause the design and move onto coding the homepage template as the client is keen to start working on the backend.

I also started doing design research for my next freelance project for a tyre and wheel company based in Surrey. I've just been researching design inspiration and interface ideas.

Normally I have enough money saved up to pay off the corporation tax at the end my accounting year - but due to covid and having no work since April, I had to use the tax reserve to pay my salary. So I did quite a scary thing - I applied for a business bounce back loan to help pay off corporation tax. 😬

The loan is interest-free for the first 12 months - this is a government-funded scheme - so I will aim to get it paid within that year to avoid any interest.

New Contract

Just towards the end of the month, I started a new contract as an Interaction Designer at Defra working on an internal project alongside IBM. It's been a lot of catching up on the project so far. I'll be working with an IBM developer to design components that aren't in the GOV UK Prototype kit or Design System for use on internal Defra websites.

This contract is inside IR35 - as it seems like most GOV contracts are now - and this meant I've had to become employed by an umbrella company.

That meant leaving my limited company for the duration of this contract - this just made tax easier - I could have stayed employed by both companies but I may have ended up on an emergency tax code.

The whole experience of an inside IR35 contract so far has been rubbish - would not recommend.

Learning

Due to being quite busy with work, I have paused the courses that I have in progress - Learn JavaScript and Learn Eleventy From Scratch but I have started learning TailwindCSS - not because I wanted to, as I'm still not sold on utility first CSS methodologies but I needed to learn it for my current freelance project as it was a requirement from the client. As a contractor/freelancer it's always good to learn new tools.

Listening

Reading

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