Thursday Afternoon
With a decent cup of tea and biscuit during its final check over, this page was published on
Beginnings
Well, being born on a Thursday afternoon seemed like a good place to start . . . and a good creative (and unmentioned) connection!
Thursday Afternoon (TA) started (on issue zero!) on the afternoon of Thursday 6 December 2012 (albeit with a week or so of personal effort before that moment!). Its first nineteen issues were sent from my own work email account when I was heading a digital design team of two (me included!).
It was a chance to help contribute to team awareness through digital (and creative) goings on happening in the world. Sharing general interestingness was its aim and colleagues, quite quickly, enjoyed looking forward to it and seeing its weekly (thereabouts) arrival in their inbox.
It steadily built a bit of reputation for the odd bit of decent content that its audience hadn't come across and was also appreciated for its simplicity and tone.
I kept it going even as the wider team changed and my design remit was expanded and role changed to Design Lead around 2013, heading a broader design team and being a senior representative within the in-house marketing team.
Developments
From the nineteenth issue onwards I started using Mailchimp to send it and benefit from its official email newsletter services that had many features (including, at the time, use your own email code for free). It was also great to give more control to subscribers particularly as they could easily unsubscribe from the missive if they no longer wanted it.
New direction
As you may have noticed, from issues 0-149 the title, Thursday Afternoon, was written in a sort of west-country (or maybe wannabe-cockney) way as Thursday Af’noon. From issue 150 the spelling was corrected (read into that what you will!) and also became a more deliberate part of my own efforts with Studio Orb (around summer 2016), rather than just my thing at my current workplace!
With those new connection made with Studio Orb a few visual changes were also made to help start and continue its new direction, which kept going for about a year and a bit.
Around the end of 2017 I had happened to put a pause on producing TA as the winter months were settling in as I intended to dedicate more of my time to expanding a few of the products on offer in my Studio Orb shop but, unfortunately, those best laid plans of exploring the shop’s potential were scuppered for quite some time.
Restarting
After those best laid plans, creating TA during 2018 and beyond, albeit not very often, was a useful output in helping me to slowly restart its more regular production.
These steady rebuilding efforts allowed me to have a bit of fun producing something I wanted to; this restart was also a chance to really try and celebrate and explore more worthwhile, meaningful content that wasn’t reduced to just being swiped, scrolled, clicked and/or scanned like it generally is on a fast-moving, social meeja platform that just wants your attention (seemingly all the time) to appease its algorithms and third-party associates.
Consideration costs time and attention, but its payoffs can be priceless.
Around this time, I was also dabbling a little with TA design features and changes.
Not quite the end
The next few changes I made to TA were an effort to bed in (at least for a year or so!) more permanent changes that allowed me to just share links, rather than redesign its appearance nearly every issue! Thursday Afternoon was again, part of my ongoing creative efforts and values.
But it was paused for the foreseeable future
After a not-too-shabby run and currently, with more things being figured out and prioritised by me, the Thursday Afternoon newsletter took a break, as of August 2021 and paused its re-run!
Now, as of November 2021, it ceases to be
Thursday Afternoon has officially ended and its Mailchimp account and data deleted.
Despite this action, Thursday afternoon still occurs as per people’s expectations of planet Earth’s societal date and time conventions.