More than a job

February 3, 2013

This article originally appeared on the Thirst Studios blog.

We’ve always said that this web and user experience design lark is more than a job to us here at Thirst Studios, and while that might just sound like a load of marketing rhubarb, I can assure you it’s absolutely true.

Outside of our client work, we’re all always reading and sharing industry articles, and regularly attend industry conferences, meet-ups and events. We do this partly because we love it and want to keep abreast of the latest tools, techniques and technologies, and partly because we consider it part of our job to be able to pass this knowledge on to our clients and use what we learn to help produce better products for them.

Aside from consuming an enormous amount of related, industry content, we also love to try to do our bit and give back. We run a regular bi-monthly event - Melbourne Geek Night - which is an informal get-together for people who work in the web industry around Melbourne to catch-up, have a yarn, share ideas and talk about new techniques and technologies.

We also produce a weekly email newsletter, which is a regular round-up of up-to-date useful and interesting industry news and links. It’s been really well received and we’re had some lovely feedback from our subscribers. You can see the latest edition online here and subscribe, if you fancy, over here.

Lastly, we regularly share our thoughts, knowledge and experience through regular articles that we write, not only here on the blog, but for a number of online sources and magazines. We’ve been particularly productive over the last few months…

Firstly not only contributing-to but also conceiving, curating and building UXmas - an advent calendar for UX professionals - along with the guys from UX Mastery. Both of our Ben’s wrote articles for UXmas; Ben Rowe contributed a brilliant article entitled The 4 H’s Of Writing Error Messages (which we were delighted to see was also picked-up and re-published by the guys behind Treehouse) and I wrote (U)X-Factor.

I’ve also recently started writing for UX Mastery, a brilliant online resource providing helpful, educational resources for aspiring user experience designers. I’m planning to impart my user experience design skills and knowledge through regular articles, starting with the first - How To Estimate A UX Project - which was also re-published by UX Australia in their email newsletter.

So are you in the enviable position where you get to do what you love for a living? If not, why not? At Thirst we’re all nerds who love nothing better then getting our hands dirty, both in and out of ‘work time’ on the things we are passionate about. Feel free to use the comments below to let us know what you guys are doing outside your working hours on things that you love.