It looks like my new attitude has rubbed off on me as here I am again writing!  Yay!  Basically I realised that I never fully explained what I want this blog to be about…

I’m sure everyone’s had that feeling when something in their life isn’t quite right, or it feels like something is missing?  I got my current job straight out of uni and don’t get me wrong I love it…(I’m not just saying that because work colleagues might read this) but it ticks most boxes.  However, there is one part missing.  One part that I have always wondered whether I would like more or whether I would want to do in the future, but I’ve no idea if I’d be any good!  And that’s to design and write a magazine.  As a kid I used to write a diary and as I’ve grown up I’ve always loved crafts and collage and then I did a BA (Hons) Graphic Design at Uni in Bristol.  Design is in my blood.  Although over the years I’d looked into doing courses in Fashion Illustration, Architecture, Life Drawing; it was @Companymagazine that re-fused the desire and focused my direction to magazines and publishing.  Back at the beginning 2012, @Companymagazine redesigned their magazine and created a brand new identity.  At some point in Summer 2012, it caught my eye.  The design is ‘exactly’ how I had always imagined I’d want a magazine to be.  It takes the ‘rawness’ of many student magazines I’d seen and many fashion/music zines in Bristol with it’s handcrafted collaged pages yet keeps the content mainstream yet varied and it’s greatest success story is that it keeps up-to-date by embracing online blogs to create, design and style the stories.  I was impressed and inspired.

Around Nov, I realised that things with the guy I’d been seeing were truly coming to an end and I needed to do something #new.  It was his mantra – if that’s the right word for it I’m unsure – “Innovate don’t Imitate” that resonated with me from the day I heard it.

At first I didn’t get it and was thinking that, of course it would be great if we could all be innovative with the way we respond and act to the situations and challenges we are presented with, but hasn’t that been explored before?  Isn’t that what self help books try to achieve?  We all know that we shouldn’t react like the rest, but it’s not that easy.  Maybe what I had considered being innovative, would be to not react in the same way as the majority and be the strong one, the surviver, the fighter, the one facing things in a different, positive way?  Wrong.  It’s not about a majority…it’s about yourself.  It’s about looking at how you respond to scenarios and reflecting and responding in a more innovative way to how you may have done in the past.  Unless you start with yourself, you cannot expect to see the concept applied to others.  It’s about reflection.  Nothing new will ever happen without reflection.  “If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you always got”

Being single let me reflect on the loss I felt.  I thought I just felt a loss due to knowing that it was over with this guy, but I now realise that it was more than that.  Every time I’m single, I feel unhappy with myself so how could I expect to ‘find happiness’ again not feeling strong alone?  They say that “happiness breeds happiness” and well it makes sense to me.

So this blog is about finding some happiness through starting to write and seeing where that takes me.  The two things that make me the happiest are colour and music, so using colour in the title means a lot.  ‘Yellow is dead’ is symbolic of there being no time to be a ‘coward’, ‘yellow-bellied’ or even ‘deceitful’ (to yourself or others) but you just have to follow your heart and TRY SOMETHING NEW today create the happiness you want.