2010 goals - part one

Rather than combine my goals - which I plan on achieving - in to one massive post with two vastly different themes, I'm doing two parts. This one is about my professional goals for the upcoming year.

2010 is already a year of change. I don't have to wildly speculate in saying that my job will look different at the end of the year - likely vastly different than it is today. Change is in the air there but I expect to be doing less in the way of print design than I currently am and far more in the area of online advertising. Yes, I'll be whoring up some of your favorite local websites even more than they already are with ads you'll come to actually pay attention to. At least that's what I want. Of course plenty of paying customers fail to get it. They think they can take what has worked in print or in their - gasp - yellow pages ad and cram it in to a leaderboard and customers will click away to their shitty, stale, broken ass websites. That's my most challenging goal this year.

My second professional goal is to make at least one of my plans reality. I didn't accomplish anything in this area last year but I did make some headway with MinnPics, my photo blog all about Minnesota. While I still want to see more traffic to that I have plenty of other half-baked plans which I've been tossing around for far too long. I actually began one earlier tonight but after a couple hours realized that I need to start with the basics in many areas including PHP, SQL databases and Drupal which I've wanted to teach myself for at least as long as some of my plans have existed. Many of my employer's websites run on Drupal and from conversations I've had I need to learn at least the basics of it.

Now that you're thoroughly bored, my third goal is to conquer the universe and cross breed frogs and humans. Kidding. Just seeing if you're paying attention. My third and final goal is to build my rather meager photography business. That means getting out and capturing more photos and working on my weak areas including portraits and lighting. While I can easily do candids, my portraits look too forced. Maybe it's because I look like hell when photographed that I don't know how to photograph others. Or maybe I'd be better off sticking with landscapes and scenery. But I'm going to force myself to conquer this area and build some sort of business from it.

That's about it for now. Tomorrow you'll get to see my personal goals.