Ten Years of Abandoned Canva Designs

Dopamine bursts and tee-shirt designs. Eight lost projects for your viewing...

a conceptual piece where I showed the audience what seats people were choosing at Chicago’s the Den, and my theories.

I been on Canva ten years. I get an idea and sprint to Canva to actualize it. Dopamine burst. Apparently, future planning gives the dopamine sensitive the hit they need. And then it tanks during execution. Every foray into Canva is a form of future planning - this tee-shirt design will make me rich, this poster will bring the fans out, this template will make me an ace.

Often, I get something pretty good within minutes, but usually, not complete. Sometimes more questions are raised and it spirals out, in a series of duplications and iterations. Then I am forced to move on. Sadness, of course. I am Sisyphis, a name I can’t spell because I’m too busy with my boulder.

Here at Substack as well, I’m at risk of iterations and abandonments. Already the drafts of posts are piling up.

This post itself is a race against the clock.

Getting a Timer Involved

Perhaps, if I can assess exactly how long these dopamine wave lasts, I could set a timer on Substack post writing. Then I might be able to get posts out before the tank.

I should try that now!

[This itself is an exciting Future Plan and I can feel it giving me more Dopamine already.]

Showing Them to You to Give Meaning

So I want to do a kindness to the previous me who made whatever little creative effort, in Canva, and then got tired, and then forgot. It may be ongoing. There’s years of this stuff to unload on you. This is Canva Log 0001.

Making a spectacle, a catalogue, of the attempts to create is surely the height of self-indulgence. But! Fear of self-indulgence stops many from being artists at all. They rest the line of demarcation between being an artist and doing something else entirely. So why, having discarded that first demarcation line, by choosing call myself an artist, would I then re-establish the line somewhere within the realm of art?

Calling something self-indulgent is one of those notes that reveals a different issue; it’s not working. Maybe it’s not giving the audience anything in exchange for the attention it requests.

So this spectacle, does it offer anything? I personally often pause the tv when someone’s papers or journals or any other written text in a documentary is casually visible. I can usually make out the words. I find that interesting.

Maybe you’ll find this Canva log interesting.

I’m trying alchemize what I perceive as lost time, retroactively.

Writing my depression book was one such effort.

Here, sharing the chaos of my Canva lifestyle, is another.

Perhaps, telling the story of failed attempts, will offer its own satisfaction to one or both of us.

A few Canva projects…

1. Here, I decided to design for myself a page-by-page template for journaling my way out of confusion. I wanted it to start very simply. These were the first two pages.

When I started dividing the circle in two, the possibilities overwhelmed me, and I ‘petered’ out. Arguably, isn’t dividing the one into the two also what happened when the universe came into existence? So it’s no surprise I fell off here, at the moment I’d otherwise enter the manifest world.

2. Designing tee-shirts for my friend Chloe Caldwell, because I think she should have more merch, and I prefer to make that case by just designing it and going, look, you could print this.

   

3. Scrolled down and found another design for Chloe. When I asked if she had a good website, she said the below and I thought, teeshirt.

   

4. What did you do today? Do I mention the below?

   

   I was looking to create a quick poster for Edinburgh fringe (in Scotland in August). I thought I’d use one of the photos taken by Ariel Fish for that issue of The Cut print I was in. I started to wonder if I could use the blown-up shirt effect to make myself into a balloon on the poster. It wasn’t reading as balloon, so I added more balloons. I was very tired after I achieved this image. I knew it wasn’t what I wanted for my poster (I don’t think?) but I had to make it. It exists now. You have to deal with it.

5. Another time I attempted to design a poster, I started to think about optimizing for the Edinburgh Fringe context. Here, I sent this to my friend Paul

   

   I had already designed and tested several vortex images

   

   Note me in the center. Also floating randomly at the bottom.

6. A foray into form building

   

   Abandoned.

7. A visual template for organizing a piece of writing once I know the intended word count. I do this all the time. I often don’t use them, but making them does allow me to sit inside the notion of word counts.

   

   Actually this is pretty useful, maybe I make these widely available, although I suspect it is the making of the template that lets you experience its truths. The magic you create yourself, etc.

8. Oh, here’s a few shots from a deck I made in advance of marketing discussions with Netflix. The last image is a slide explaining how I was having trouble identifying exact frames I wanted to pull for potential use. Natasha Lyonne, director, really celebrated me when I made these decks. And would pipe in on the e-mail thread, acknowledging them. Sometimes I’d show up with something exhaustive related to the project, time codes, etc.. but I’d be exhausted and sort of over it, and she’d look at it, and say, “no, this is good work” and then we’d go through it. Very special.

   

   

   Some issues I had with the tech, offered in a slide...

   

   I’m finding this interesting, but I am completely exhausted, and the dopamine is gone. Do I have the energy to hit post? Not sure. Can always edit later.

   A quick re-read reveals the paragraphs, and the headers, aren’t really flowing. But fuck it, you read reddit, probably, and that’s chaos.

   -Jacqueline