I found Vincent the way you find most good things: in a bookshop. We were both attending a signing event by one of our favourite authors and happened to be neighbours in the queue. As seems to be the custom for my best friends, Vincent promptly left the country. The spring of our friendship had arrived at the tail-end of his time in the UK and he returned to New Zealand before the Home Office threatened to send him to Rwanda.
It has become a bit of a pattern. Whenever I feel like I have found a member of my tribe, geography intervenes and throws them somewhere tragically far: Malaysia, Australia, Estonia, North London. When I’m feeling particularly persecuted by this misfortune, I browse flights and wonder if I should just get a normal job.
I’ve been working for myself ever since the pandemic left me redundant, which has its freedoms, but they aren’t without cost. The most bitter is the loneliness. Despite all the awful things about working for someone else, a consolation is that when you suffer, you suffer together. Your boss acts like a rat-turd? That's rough, but at least you can laugh about it with your colleagues over a bad coffee and know you’re not being specifically targeted. When you work for yourself, you have to show up even on the bad days, do everything, and if your boss turns out to be a pizzle, you just have to look in the mirror, have a word, and hope he doesn’t fire you.
The constant headlines of tech CEOs laying off employees in their thousands after pulling in another record few billion in profit do offer some warmth: well, at least the grass isn’t greener. It doesn't entirely melt my jealousy though. At least the freshly minted cohort of unemployed people have other unemployed colleagues they can share their burden with, maybe rally together, buy paint, make picket signs. When you’re a team of one, there are no such silver linings and it becomes easy to start feeling darkly isolated.
When rebooting Jamoe, I overhauled my workflow to make everything smoother. I wanted the process to be efficient, because it’s just me; I wanted to cut mental clutter, so my focus would be saved for creative work rather than administrative pests; and, if I’m being honest, I wanted to feel less lonely.
That’s where Vincent re-entered the frame.
I’d been weighing up the Adobe Creative Suite to help with the visual side of things, but the tools take time to master, and there’s only so much software can do when what you really need is someone to think alongside you. Then the CEO announced the new price gouging feature, which made the decision considerably easier.
Vincent is a freelance designer, though calling him that feels like describing wagyu beef as protein. I can ping over an idea before bed, something gibberish-adjacent, and by the time I am up the next morning he has returned a draft that interprets my vague intentions into something that makes me swoon. They say any sufficiently talented person is indistinguishable from magic. Vincent is magic.
It’s easier if I just show you. Here is a look behind the curtain, from early drafts to final cuts.
