Like I said in Week 9, this week marks the start of the Clickrabbit design sprint.

Finally.

But before I get into that, I need to explain why design is such a weird thing for me.

I’ve been into graphic design since I was probably 13.

It started because I'd randomly reach out to YouTubers I liked and ask if I could make their channel graphics for them.

Somehow, some actually said yes.

These people had 100,000+ subscribers and I was some squeaky kid sitting behind Photoshop, so the fact that I was actually working with them felt insane to me.

Bit biased, but I think the designs were pretty good for a 13-year-old.

I think the most I ever got paid was about £80.

So looking back, I was definitely getting scammed.

But I didn’t care.

I had no business owning Adobe software at 13, but I definitely made the most of it, designing the most random shit I could think of.

Eventually, that hobby evolved into making logos for companies.

Then local websites.

Then actual clients outside of Gibraltar.

And for almost ten years, design has quietly become one of my main skills.

However, it’s also slowly become one of the things I hate doing most.

Which brings us nicely back to Clickrabbit.

CLICKRABBIT

The goal for this week was simple.

I needed to finally turn the company I’ve had sitting in my head into something other people can actually see.

The problem is, design matters a lot to me.

Especially now.

AI has made it ridiculously easy to make something that looks decent.

Logos, websites, graphics, copy.

Everyone has access to the same tools.

Which I think makes having your own identity even more important.

In a world full of duplicates, your greatest edge is being unique.

With Clickrabbit, I always envisioned the brand feeling bold and innovative.

I want it to eventually become the sort of agency where other agencies quietly check what we’re doing because we might have figured out something worth copying.

Not because we’re the biggest, but because we think differently.

So naturally, I opened Figma and produced some of the worst designs known to man.

I’d stare at them.

Play Clash Royale.

Lose.

Stare at the designs again.

Move some stuff around.

And slowly start to question if I've ever truly been good at design.

As you can tell, this is the part of my design process that I hate.

When I’m making something random, I can mess around for hours and create something I like.

But when it matters, suddenly every decision feels permanent and I start questioning whether I can design at all.

It happened years ago when I had a tiny web agency too.

I could charge around £2,000 for a website, which sounded insane as a teenager.

Then I’d obsess over it for so long that I somehow turned a high-value skill into minimum-wage work.

This week, I could feel myself doing it again.

The funny thing is that I know this pattern now.

Knowing it exists does absolutely nothing to stop me doing it though.

Eventually, I got so annoyed that I closed everything and decided I was done with designing.

Luckily, I cooled off and at around 7pm, I made a coffee, grabbed my notebook, and basically decided one of two things was happening that night.

Either I was burning myself out completely by hitting another design block.

Or I was getting a good design.

No software.

No trying to make it look nice.

I just drew what was in my head.

And about an hour later, I had most of the landing page mapped out.

So I reopened Figma, ready for my retribution.

And surprisingly, I actually liked what came out.

The idea behind this section is pretty simple.

A lot of lead generation is incentivised around getting you the cheapest possible lead.

But a cheap lead means nothing if they never become a customer.

I'm building Clickrabbit to address this, so instead of focusing on cheap leads, we'll be focusing on how much money we can make our clients.

So rather than just showing some pretty ads, I wanted the design to make it feel like there’s an actual system underneath everything.

Who is this person?

Are they actually a good fit?

What are they worth?

Did they book?

Did they eventually become a customer?

The idea behind any good design is to have it explain what you sell or what you do before you ever talk to a client.

Your website should always be your hardest-working sales employee, working 24/7.

As you can tell, I'm extremely passionate when it comes to both design and marketing systems.

Which makes it slightly ridiculous that I can spend half the week convincing myself I have absolutely no idea what I'm doing.

And apparently, one creative identity crisis wasn't enough for Week 10.

Because while all of this was happening, I also decided it was finally time to start doing something I've wanted to do for years.

MY ACTUAL CHILDHOOD DREAM

Believe it or not though, my big dream as a kid was never to become a designer, and definitely not a marketer.

I know.

Shocking.

Apparently eight-year-olds don’t lie awake dreaming about pixel-perfect designs and paid ads.

Regardless, my childhood dream, like many others, was to become a YouTuber.

I remember getting a GoPro, strapping it underneath my penny board, which is basically a tiny skateboard, and riding around convinced I had just discovered cinema.

Please ignore the pose. I really was a cringey little bastard.

Anyway, I’ve always loved videos and YouTube.

People like Casey Neistat could make a video about basically nothing and somehow make it interesting.

He once made a whole video about attaching a charging cable to his e-bike so that whenever he needed to charge it, he'd just have to plug it in instead of looking through his bag for the cable, attaching it, and then plugging it in.

The video was entirely about some velcro, zip ties, and a battery.

And the way he could convey the story and keep you interested was crazy.

Video Link - CUSTOMIZE EVERYTHING

The ability to make normal life interesting is such a unique skill, and it's entirely dependent on how you tell the story and what emotions you engineer the video to create in the viewer.

A few years ago, I thought maybe I should make marketing videos.

And I did.

The usual TikTok guru type of content.

As you can imagine, it ended the same week it started because the content was never actually me.

I like marketing.

But I don’t breathe marketing.

It’s a skill I’m using to get to a place where I can do my real dream of documenting.

People.

Places.

Stories.

How life changes depending on where you are in the world.

And I think Life of Jake finally gives me a reason to start learning how.

Because the more weeks I write, the more obvious one limitation of writing becomes.

I can tell Future Jake exactly what was happening inside my head.

But I can't show him what was happening outside of it.

ALL THE GEAR, NO IDEA

The nine written articles are great for showing what’s going on inside my head week by week.

But they can’t show Future Jake what this actually looked like.

My room.

Gibraltar.

The people around me.

The things I was building.

All the little details my terrible memory will eventually delete.

So I want every week to have a little visual diary alongside it.

Nothing massive.

Just enough that one day I can look back and actually see what these weeks felt like, rather than only reading what I thought about them.

I actually tried starting this a few weeks ago.

I spent two days filming myself putting some boards on my wall.

Different angles.

Different shots.

Thought it looked sick.

Then I put the footage on an SD card and never opened it again.

This week, I tried again.

I recorded a few clips from behind the scenes and, to be honest, I really like recording and setting stuff up.

And this time I actually even opened DaVinci, which is my editing software.

And excuse my language[[| {{firstName}}]].

But what the flying fuck.

If you've never seen that app before, it looks like something SpaceX uses to land spacecraft.

It was a long day learning how to do the simple stuff and, to be honest, a good editor could have probably done everything I did within 20 minutes, which is a bit embarrassing.

For context, I spent two hours trying to make some text disappear behind a notebook cover.

Two hours.

And it still didn’t work, so I gave up and just did a badly timed cut instead.

In my head, I’m Peter McKinnon.

Beautiful shots.

Perfect lighting.

Ridiculous edits.

In reality:

I'm currently just all the gear, no idea.

The videos are a little static.

A little boring.

And on Sunday, I genuinely felt shit about them.

Because this is something I’ve wanted to do since I was a kid.

Surely I should be better?

Except that makes absolutely no sense.

I’ve barely started.

And if I keep refusing to make videos because they don’t look like someone who has spent years making videos, I’m never going to get there.

So I’m posting them.

And I think this is where the two completely different parts of my week ended up becoming the same thing.

With Clickrabbit, I hated the first designs because they weren't what I could see in my head.

With video, I hated the first edits because they weren't what I could see in my head.

Apparently being able to imagine something much better than you can currently make it is a slightly annoying way to live.

But I suppose there is only one way to close that gap.

Keep making stuff.

IT IS WHAT IT IS

There isn't really some massive conclusion to this week.

Clickrabbit isn't finished.

The videos aren't particularly good yet.

And I still apparently lose all confidence in my ability to design whenever I actually care about what I'm designing.

But weirdly, it's probably been my favourite week so far.

I worked on Clickrabbit.

I recorded things.

I edited them.

I wrote about all of it.

And somewhere in the middle of fucking around with all of that, I realised this whole project might have actually been a pretty good idea.

At least I'm making stuff.

Taken me 10 weeks to realise that, but it is what it is.