TFS Update: Brand remodel + my next spreadsheet workshop
Includes a very cheerful gif and an invite to help me decide when to hold my "Google Sheets skills for challenging times" workshop in April
As I foreshadowed, I'm about to do that thing where I gush about The Friendly Spreadsheet’s new branding. The website (and almost everything else) looks a little cuter now!
You know why I love this? It’s the embodiment of the vibe I bring to the function. I picked The Friendly Spreadsheet as my business name in an attempt to describe how I show up in the world, and now I have the perfect visual parry for the one person who responded to it with it “well that’s oxymoronic”. (Mostly people say “That’s a great name, I love it,” but of course I’m stuck on the exception.)
The ‘vibe I bring to the function’ is literal. My next door neighbor (a therapist by trade) gathered our block last month to talk about resilience and preparedness, and I offered up a fun group spreadsheet exercise to practice offering and receiving help from one another. And folks are actually using it, which definitely surprised me!
The vibe of the logo is also aspirational. My greatest business weakness is marketing, and no matter how many times I remind myself that marketing is about helping me reach the people I can benefit, it still feels wildly uncomfortable to promote myself. Now I can tell myself “be the sprite Kat” when I’m headed out of my comfort zone to tell people I exist. I’ve got a visual reminder that no one believes in a friendly spreadsheet until they meet one, and that for the most part, they’re delighted when they do.
Speaking of spreadsheets! With the wild success of getting my neighbors to play with me in Google Sheets, I’m dusting off my 1 hour online Google Sheets Foundations workshop as a live pay-what-you-want offering. This was originally developed as “Google Sheets for Artists” for the Art Brand Alliance; it’s both thorough and thoroughly unintimidating. I’ve updated it to include Tables and with a mutual aid/resistance focus. You don’t need to know much to build a really useful spreadsheet! If this is something you would be interested in taking, can you hop over to this Doodle poll and let me know what time(s) might work for you? If you have a friend or colleague who would like this, please pass the link along to them too! This is my first time offering a webinar under my own umbrella, and scheduling it is the most daunting part.
Finally, warm thanks to the two pros who made my ‘get grown up branding’ wishes come true. First up, Jill Ivey built out a writing style guide for the brand voice, and incidentally rebuilt some of my writing confidence in the process. Then Pam Huber came in for the visuals and knocked it out of the park. In case it hasn’t come up yet, I’m a bit of typography/lettering/design enthusiast, which results in me caring about very tiny details while also being very slow to articulate what it is about them that isn’t quite right. For the wrong graphic designer, that makes me a nightmare client.
Pam was dreamy about my tortoise pacing, and took my awkward photos of marked up printouts of logo versions in stride, and was a pleasure to email with. She also surprised with me with the gif version of the logo (shown earlier) right at the point where late winter combined with a crumbling federal government was about ready to tip me over into despair. I’ve kept it open in a browser tab for a boost of cheerfulness ever since. (Would I recommend shoring up your mental health with a gif? No. Is it working for me? Yes.)
You ever save up for something for a long time, and then it turns out it even with all that anticipation it’s better than you expected? Rebranding has been that for me. I hope your next planned splurge brings you this much joy!