In my first post I wrote a list of what I wanted to do when working for myself and I thought that would be a good place to end this journey, so here’s the list again.
What did I want to achieve from Whoopee?
- Have a more sustainable and enriched life
- Make the web a little bit nicer for everyone
- Help people get real value from design
- Take the scary out of accessibility
- Make work that I’m proud of
And I did just that!
The biggest project I’ve worked on since January 2021 is the main website for Hammersmith & Fulham council and just recently I went to a Localgov Drupal camp where people from other councils came to me and said “Justine, you’ve used colour, we want colour!”, “You’re doing some really great things with H&F”, “How do we do this thing on our website?”.
All of these things made me feel proud of what I’ve done, ensured me that others think the work is a little bit nicer and because we’ve been sharing our work back to the LGD community, we’re also helping people to get value from design.
Hold on, who is this we?!
Well, I partnered with my good friend and fellow ex Torchbox peep, Rupert Jabelman. He’s one of the people who pushed me into this crazy contracting world when I realised I was being made redundant.
Ru’s skills compliment mine wonderfully, what he can’t do I can and vise versa. He understands my random ramblings when my thoughts leak out of my mouth and we’ve got very similar life goals. So it just made sense.
We started chicken a while back now and there were actually 3 of us, (not my real) Uncle Glenn Barr joined us in being a director, but stepped down in February this year and that’s when things got real. It no longer made sense for us to keep our own companies going, hence the closing of Whoopee! With that came a lot more discussion about what our plans and goals are for the next few years and actually writing all the grown-up businessey documents that come with running a studio like chicken.
One day I’ll find the time move a few of these blog posts over to there, and together we’ll talk about the things that interest us and what chicken means to us.
So if you’re looking to work with me, you now get a better, more full service deal over at chicken.