Issue 30: New Year, New Me
On resolutions, great expectations and new names!
✨ Onward and upward
Happy 2025 and welcome back to the ‘Stack! It’s hard to believe we’re already on Issue 30, and entering our second calendar year together. I hope everyone had a wonderful holiday season, and I’m so excited to share everything I have planned for the coming year with you. New years are always a funny time. They invite a lot of pressure to not only set goals and resolutions, but kick off the new era right with a clean house, or a dubiously executable Plan for Greatness™. As myriad Instagram posts have reminded me these past few years, these transition days are arbitrary, and this pressure is unhelpful. January 1st doesn’t have any kind of cosmic distinction. You can set a resolution on any random Tuesday. And if the first day of the new year doesn’t go perfectly (as it probably won’t) that has no bearing on the next 364 days.
That said, January is as good a time as any to take stock of our goals and the changes we want to make in our lives. Indeed, it’s probably better than average. After the intensity of the holiday season and the liminal space that divides the end of December and now, most of us approach the new year with renewed motivation and a clearer sense of our dreams and aspirations. If long term plans take slow, painstaking work to execute, the renewed motivation a new year brings certainly doesn’t hurt. The important thing is to distinguish between pressure and opportunity. These days don’t make or break us, but they are a chance to take stock of what matters and where we want to go.
With that in mind, I have some very exciting things to share with you over the next few weeks, including a project I’ve been working on nonstop for over a year. But first, in the spirit of the New Year I want to share that going forward, The Aura Creative Substack will have a new name! From next week on, this Substack will be known as Guidelines. I will be speaking much more about this name – where it comes from, what it means, and how it ties into the aforementioned project – over the coming weeks. For now, read on as we journey into the new year together!
🌅 Moodboard of the week
This week’s moodboard is inspired by first steps – waking up, blooming, tying our shoes, making an improbably neat to-do list, and drinking that nice glass of water we probably all need. Click here or below to view the full board on Pinterest.
🔍 Question of the week
“Is Canva actually good or is it just easy?”
I have been so excited to answer this question that I have literally been saving it. I have SO many feelings about Canva, but probably not the ones you’d think. For those of you who are unfamiliar, Canva is a graphic design program for non-designers. It’s free/relatively inexpensive, depending on which version you use, and intended to make the design process accessible from both an aesthetic and technical standpoint. In other words, a lay person should be able to use Canva to create a decent poster or Instagram post with minimal technical know-how and no design education.
In theory, Canva meets an important need. I’m a big believer in tools that allow clients to take their brands into their own hands and that provide a solid and foolproof aesthetic baseline. Even speaking as a designer, not every project requires a “reinvent the wheel” approach, and tools like Squarespace (for which I am a relentless advocate) have transformed the accessibility of good design. I love the idea of a design program everyone can use, and would especially have loved something like this as a kid when I was first learning how to design.
Unfortunately, in practice, I think Canva sucks. In my opinion, it’s neither good nor easy. In my experience their templates look bad the moment you put real content into them, they seriously limit the assets you can use, it’s missing pretty basic functionality, and simple tasks are made needlessly complicated. Even just laying things out and rearranging content can be really hard. Its free version is, understandably, missing a lot of features. But by the time you pay for it, it’s not that much cheaper than a professional design program. The learning curve with Canva is slightly lower when it comes to getting started than it might be with something like Photoshop, but when it comes to creating something good once you learn the basics, I find it infinitely harder.
I think the main thing Canva has going for it is that it doesn’t have much competition. Adobe professional programs are pretty expensive if you want to do both digital and print work (though I’ve heard promising things about Adobe Express as a Canva alternative) and Figma (my all-time favorite design program) only creates digital assets. That said, I think Canva has a long way to go before meeting the needs of lay designers or professionals from both a usability and execution standpoint. If you’re looking to create a more reliable product, it may be worth exploring other options.
Submit your burning design questions by sending me a message below. Questions can relate to design itself, entrepreneurship, workflow, or anything you think I may be able to answer. There are no limits.
🎧 Soundtrack of the week
This week’s soundtrack is an ode to the “I Want” song – the point in most musicals when the main character declares the objective or goal that will propel their story forward. As it happens, they tend to be bangers, and I can’t think of any better way to start off the year than by listening to all of them at once. Preview below, and click here to listen and save on Spotify.
🖤 My Favorite Things
I got this print, by illustrator Julien Posture, at Montreal graphic design and print shop Paperole right before I bought my house. Since I refused to really decorate before painting my room, it’s just been chilling by my bed for over a year, but after a marathon 3-room paint sesh over the weekend, it’s finally up. Known as “Inventory of Likeness No. 2” it examines the various shapes and connotations of a splat and every time I look at it, I see something new. It’s design-y, creative, aesthetically phenomenal, and, most importantly, as far as I’m concerned, hilarious.
Image from Julien Posture’s website, where you can learn more about this image and others like it. Check out Paperole’s awesome print collection at their site here, and be sure to stop by if you’re ever in MTL.
🌱 Touching Grass
📖 What I’m reading: As far as I can tell, everything R.F. Kuang writes is gripping and thought-provoking, and so far The Poppy War is no exception. I love the way she takes literary and fantasy tropes and turns them on their heads, often making me question how I look at my own world in the context of an otherwise unrelatable-by-design fantasy story.
🥬 What I’m eating: After a delightfully indulgent holiday season, a week exploring the culinary delights of French Canada, and a night during this weekend’s marathon paint sesh spent eating McDonalds on the floor (mainly for the aesthetic), I’m really looking forward to eating a vegetable.
🎧 What I’m listening to: This week’s playlist was inspired by one of my all-time favorite YouTube videos, the “I Want” Song Medley sung by Jonah Platt (Ben Platt’s brother). I will never understand why this video never went viral (at least among theater nerds) but it’s a true work of art.
📺 What I’m watching: The Abbot Elementary x It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia crossover episode comes out this Wednesday. The world is not ready, and neither am I.