2024: a year worth reviewing

I don’t typically write yearly reviews and have long-since stopped making grand resolutions in public. But for various reasons, 2024 feels like a year that deserves a little more reflection than usual. 

The last 12 months have been busy and challenging, but also rich and rewarding in ways that do not come around too often. I want to get it all out of my system and on to the page to mark a few personal milestones. 

There may also be some of you reading this who have followed me online or via my newsletter for many years. I haven’t shared much for some time, so an annual review feels like a good way to let you know what I’ve been up to. 

I know what you are thinking. No one posts an annual review in the middle of January. It does feel a little bit silly, but I started writing this in December and things got a bit out of hand. Sorry about that. Grab a cuppa. 

Fiction: to be or, in actual fact, not to be

Let’s get the bad news out of the way first. 

My fiction took even more of a back seat in 2024 than it did the other years that make up the last decade. In fact, I effectively marched it to the rear of my life-shaped vehicle and stuffed it in the boot.

The truth is, the majority of this piece is about my freelance content design and podcast production work, which has been my real job for years. I have not given up on the publishing world, but it seems crackers to pretend I don’t have this entire separate catalogue of creative work that makes up a career. 

That said, I do plan to write new fiction this year. I have a good sense of what that might look like and how I can both hold myself accountable and ‘show my work’. I’m excited by the story and project ideas I’ve had brewing for a while and I really just need to spend a few months in front of the keyboard. 

Some of you have followed my writing or just me as a person on the internet for a long time. As you might imagine, I have done plenty of soul searching over what feels like a career in writing fiction that never happened. 

But I can’t deny the fire still burns inside me. Even though it’s been 13 years since my first novel, A is for Angelica, was published, I have never consciously sat down and said to myself, “I think that was it for me. That was my chance.” 

At the same time, I also recognise how far away I am from even completing a single draft manuscript, never mind publication. Writing fiction needs to become part of my routine and I need to accept that with four children and full-time freelance work, I am going to find that very difficult. 

Let’s see what the new year brings. I am actively optimistic. 

Context: what do I actually do?

I suppose before I start banging on about all the things I did in 2024, I should probably explain what a content designer does. Here is a definition from Catherine Dickinson of Digital Advice (England):

Content designers make complex information easy to understand. They decide how content should be written and presented to best meet user needs.

And here is the official word from the UK government:

Content designers make things easier for people to understand and use. This can involve working on a single piece of content or on the end-to-end journey of a service to help users complete their goal and government deliver a policy intent.

Somewhat ironically, both definitions include jargon. But you won’t be surprised to hear that by ‘user’ we mean ‘person’ and by ‘needs’ we mean things that they need to do, find out or achieve. 

I often explain content design by comparing it to my previous life, where I was better described as a copywriter, a more familiar job title. 

A copywriter will get a brief and write content without necessarily having the budget or support to do any research. For a content designer, that research is an absolutely essential part of the process. It provides evidence that shows what people need from the content before you actually make it. And what people need may not always be words; it could be a table, calculator, whatever. 

Anyway, most of my days are spent working as a freelance content designer. In recent years, I’ve taken senior and lead content design roles working on projects typically in the public and charity sectors here in the UK. And in the last 12 months I have done some of the most interesting, rewarding work of my career. 

One more thing before we really do crack on. I produce podcasts for a living too. It makes up a small percentage of my income, but I love making podcasts and can’t quite believe I get to do it for actual money. It is very much a hobby or side hustle that turned into a thing and shout out here to anyone who listened to the Write for Your Life podcast back in the day. Who’d have thought, right?

Right, it is time to finally, at last, without further a-faff, look back on 2024 and all that it brought, wrought and taught. 

Freelancing in uncertain times

Since going freelance in 2017, I have found myself in the right place at the right time enough that I have never had a period without work. I continued that run in 2024 and by all metrics, it’s been an objectively successful year. But there have been moments of real uncertainly that felt distinctly not fun.

That non-fun started before 2024 even began. I’d spent 10 months with some ace folks at TPXimpact to redesign the local plan-making process for local authorities. It was challenging, meaningful work and it felt like we were making good progress in a sometimes tricky environment. 

We were working with the Department for Housing, Communities and Levelling-up (DLUHC), which has since been renamed. As is common with long-term government contracts, the work was split into shorter, typically three-month ‘statements of work’.

As a freelancer, this setup meant my own contract with TPXimpact would need to be renewed for each statement of work. And I could only be offered a contract once DLUHC had agreed and signed off the work with TPXimpact in the first place. 

In practice, that led to a couple of Friday afternoons where I did not know whether I would be needed the following Monday morning. And by this point, I had committed to full-time hours, so no new contract would literally mean no work or income for me at all. 

Somewhat inevitably, going into Christmas 2023, I did indeed get the nod to say I should look for other work as a new contract appeared unlikely. Early December is a terrible time to be looking for new client projects, but with little choice I put the feelers out. It was all rather stressful. 

Thankfully, those feelers led me back to Kinship, a charity I had done some work for the year before. They were making their first podcast and wanted someone to come and produce it for them. Great! Then, as luck would have it, in the first few days of January, I got a message from TPXimpact to say that actually, there was a new DLUHC contract available for me after all. 

So, phew. Or at least, phew for a while. Because a few months later I would find myself in the exact same position, only this time with a little more warning. At that point, it was made clear that there really was no new contract coming, which meant that the water was less muddy and I could plan accordingly. 

None of this was anyone’s fault, by the way. Self-employment inherently carries a certain amount of risk and there is always the possibility that work dries up or disappears quite quickly. It’s why most people are not freelance, right?

But I’ve been doing this for almost eight years, which is longer than I was in any permanent job. And when I did have permanent jobs, on two occasions I was made redundant by agencies who had been successful for many years. Experience tells me you can be plunged into career uncertainty at any time. There is rarely anything you can do about it. 

Still, I don’t think I would recommend throwing all your eggs in the proverbial singular basket as a freelancer. If you commit all your time to one project and one company, you are open to this kind of cliff-edge situation where everything can suddenly stop. You become extremely reliant on other people, which isn’t much fun for either party when crunch time comes along.

Anyway, since this all happened I have reverted back to my tried and trusted approach of working with more than one client at a time. If you can handle the context switching, I find it keeps me on my toes and opens me up to a wider range of experiences, topics and people. 

Okay, let’s talk about some actual things that I did last year. 

Kinship Together podcast 

Kinship is the UK’s leading charity for kinship carers in England and Wales and this is their mission. 

We’re here for kinship carers – friends or family who step up to raise a child when their parents aren’t able to. Let’s commit to change for kinship families.

This is an area I have worked in a fair bit. In 2022, I was part of a small team that produced a website for Buckinghamshire Council called the Guardians’ Guide. It featured guidance for special guardians, a type of kinship carer. And in 2023, I worked with Kinship for the first time, where I wrote and produced a whole load of new information and guidance content. 

When the opportunity to produce a podcast for Kinship came along (see above), I was very excited. I’d produced several podcasts before, but this felt like a chance to do something different for a cause I had come to really care about. Even better, I would have the organisational and motivational support of the excellent Sarah Clarke, who I would work with again later in the year. 

The podcast took a straightforward interview format. Just six episodes. The first was with Kinship’s CEO, Lucy Peake and the rest were conversations I had with five different kinship carers. The aim was to give other kinship carers a chance to hear directly from people who had been through similar experiences. 

From a production point of view, I did pretty much everything. I arranged, carried out, recorded and edited the interviews. I also wrote and narrated the supporting scripts to make sure each episode hung together, and that they worked well as a collection of stories. I did not write the intro jingle. 

There was no specific goal or metric we wanted to achieve, but I know together those episodes have been listened to thousands of times already. I was pleased with how they came out and I think anyone could listen to them and find the voice and story from each kinship carer compelling. 

I was and continue to be very grateful to each of them for trusting me with their time and story. It was a real privilege and their kind feedback on hearing their finished episodes meant an awful lot. 

You can listen to Kinship Together in all the usual podcast places, as well as the Kinship website. 

Local Plans content strategy 

While the podcast for Kinship was great, my primary piece of work at the beginning of the year was the new TPXimpact contract, a continuation of the work I had been doing previously on Local Plans. 

Here’s how the government describes a Local Plan:

Local Plans, prepared by a local planning authority in consultation with its community, set out a vision and a framework for the future development of an area. Once in place, Local Plans become part of the statutory development plan. The statutory development plan for the area is the starting point for determining local planning applications. 

Basically, every city, town and borough across the country has a Local Plan. It is a super-important document that not that many people know about, even though it defines almost everything about where they live. 

Our overall aim was to make Local Plans easier for local authorities to create and more accessible for the general public. Over many months, I was part of a series of discovery and alpha projects, which saw me develop a range of prototypes that were used in many user research sessions. 

One of the consistent issues that came up was a lack of clear guidance for planning officers and local authority teams. The existing process was (still is, I imagine) confusing, inconsistent and not based on user needs. So come January ,we started work on a new area of GOV.UK called ‘Create or update a Local Plan’. As lead content designer, I wrote the content strategy behind it all. 

I’ve done plenty of strategy work before, but this was the first time I’d written something so substantial for central government. Inevitably, there were lots of people involved, which meant a fair bit of careful consultation and gentle persuasion with various stakeholders, including policy teams. 

The document itself included user and business needs, content principles, governance processes and workflows, and a narrow selection of content types. I had just managed to complete the work when the news came in that my time with DLUHC and Local Plans would come to an end. 

It was an ace experience though and one where I learned an awful lot about the challenges of central government. I also got to work with some brilliant people at TPXimpact and was pretty sad to wave goodbye. 

Fingers crossed, the content strategy I left behind will provide the foundations for policymakers and user-centred designers to collaborate and transform how Local Plans are made. 

One content designer from DLUHC described the document as ‘a thing of beauty’, and I will very much take that for feedback. 

Podcast production for Lost Dot 

Since September 2022, I have produced the official podcast for all of Lost Dot’s ultra-distance cycling races. It’s been one of the best experiences of my career and I absolutely love being part of this fantastic team.

The first race I covered was the second edition of the Trans Pyrenees race. I went out to the Pyrenees and spent more than a week in the media car, chasing riders, interviewing them and documenting the whole thing in the form of a podcast. It was brilliant, but it was also a lot. 

Since then, I have produced several more race podcasts from home. The team out on the road gather all the interviews and other audio clips, which I then edit and combine with a script and narrative voiceover. I also turn some of the best interviews into lovely videos for social media.

There is so much more to it than that and I plan to finally write about the whole shebang this year. But the short of it is I make an audio documentary every day for two to three weeks. 

In 2024, Lost Dot organised three races, including a new one called The Accursed Race, a fixed-route, off-road jaunt around the Balkans. Then there were the two established races. In September, the fourth edition of the Trans Pyrenees, and just before that in the summer, one of the best-known and most prestigious ultra races in the world: The Transcontinental Race. 

The headline news is that all three races went incredibly well and I was so proud of the end result. Each episode is a true collaborative effort, but the pressure is very much on me to deliver the goods and hang a story together at the end of every day. It’s perhaps the only thing I do that forces me to use all my skills and experience from across different areas of work and disciplines. I bloody love it. 

The more detailed news is that we used The Accursed Race to trial a longer format, which included extended rider interviews and contextual world building from the race reporters. It made for a more immersive experience and set the tone for the following two races later in the year. 

Although the race podcasts do cover what’s happening at the front and follow the leaders to a point, the aim really is to give all types of rider a voice. There is no video coverage and the distances are so vast, the only way we are able to tell these rider stories is through incredible photography and the podcast.

In the content design world, we take about iteration all the time. Making something, testing it and finding ways to improve before going again. Since that first race I produced in 2022, this has been our approach as a race team. And I think this year, we found a blueprint for making a consistently brill podcast.

I’m signed up to produce the second edition of The Accursed in May this year and what will be my fourth Trans Pyrenees race in October. I’m going to miss The Transcontinental due to school and family holidays, but I know when the time comes I’ll be following along from wherever I am. 

First project with Public Digital

Okay, back to the bit where I’m a content designer. It is late April 2024 and I have just found out that the aforementioned content strategy work will be my last contract with TPXimpact for a while. 

(Note here to say that the team gave me the most lovely send off and were very generous with their kind words and well wishes. In general, I strongly recommend doing everything you can to understand why things happen and how sometimes they just dowithout it being anyone’s fault. Bonus freelancing tip: always try and part on good terms.)

So, I set out about fettling my portfolio and posting the usual LinkedIn updates to let people know I was about to become available for work. After a couple of underwhelming phone conversations with some random design agencies, I got a message from my pal and former workmate, Hafsah. She’s a Director at Public Digital and suggested I put myself forward for the company’s network of specialist freelancers.

So I did. And they let me join. Then lo and behold, I was asked to work on a new project and spent the entire second half of the year with some of the most talented people I’ve ever worked with. Not only that, the project will without question be one of the most important and challenging I ever get to work on. 

But there is a slight catch – I can’t really talk about it. It has a high public profile in the UK and along with other companies and collaborators, we are still right in the thick of designing and building a new service from scratch. 

For my part, there was a lot of trauma-informed design work early on to establish some vital content guidelines that helped set the entire tone of the project. In general, I’ve worked alongside the Public Digital crew to make sure the people we are designing the service for are at the heart of every decision. 

I know that’s all very vague, but as you can probably tell it’s been a superb experience so far. I’m sure I will be able to write more openly about it in the future, but for now this work continues into 2025 and there is lots to do. 

One more thing! In November, I ran a content design workshop for the design community of practice at Public Digital. It was most enjoyable and great to meet and chat to those designers on the wider team who I hadn’t already spoken to or worked with. Appreciated the invite!

Accessibility guides for The Wildlife Trusts

In July, another new client came along as I teamed up again with Sarah Clarke, who by now had left Kinship and started her own freelance journey. Together, we pitched for and won the contract to create two documents for The Wildlife Trusts: one guide and one template. 

The aim of both documents was to help Trusts and indeed other organisations create and manage more accessible green and blue spaces. What the heck’s a green and blue space? Here is the definition from one of the documents. 

Green and blue spaces usually describe places that have water, grass or trees. Examples include nature reserves, walking trails, lakes and rivers. They are often open to the public and free to access. 

We started this work in early August and submitted the final version of each document in December. Sarah led on the research side of things and was brilliant at getting people from across different sectors interested and involved with the project. We ran several workshops and research sessions, which really shaped the content and format of the documents. 

The first of those documents was a template for The Wildlife Trust’s many nature reserves to create better ‘know before you go’ information. This is the stuff you might look for on a website to find out more about a reserve before you visit. If you are a persona with accessibility needs, it should help you decide whether the reserve will be suitable and how you may need to prepare. 

While most reserves already had ‘know before you go’ information online, the pages were not consistent or clear. In building a template for reserves to complete, we developed a whole new taxonomy to try and solve that problem. We also covered a much broader range of information with a focus on better describing a reserve’s accessibility features (or lack thereof).

The second document was a best practice guide for Trusts and other organisations to use. From indoor spaces to outdoor furniture, staff training to tactile maps, the aim was to give people the essential building blocks for making their green and blue spaces more accessible. 

This was an unexpected but enjoyable piece of work where again, I felt like I learned an awful lot. Working with Sarah was great (you should hire her) and I’ll add links to both documents once The Wildlife Trusts publish them. 

I did most of this work alongside the work above for Public Digital. This may be the first year where I can say that every penny of my freelance income has been as a result of a project I can confidently describe as for good. 

It doesn’t always pan out, but that’s exactly where I’ve been pointing myself for years and where I want to be in future.

Plain English Weekly

That’s all the official work stuff done, but I do also want to mention Plain English Weekly. This is a newsletter I started in the second half of 2023, failed to maintain when things got really busy in 2024, but picked back up towards the end of the year and intend to work on in 2025. 

Plain English Weekly is an email newsletter for people who want to ditch the jargon and write clear, accessible content. Every week, I send five fantastic links straight to your inbox. Each email includes advice, tools, and resources on how to write in clear language, create accessible, inclusive content, and understand your audience. 

Plain English Weekly is one of those side projects that has potential to be a much bigger thing. Despite little in the way of marketing, there are nearly 1000 people subscribed to the newsletter and it has a healthy 60% open rate. Its readers work at some of the biggest organisations and companies in the world. 

It seems like I have quietly proved there is a demand for clear language advice, resources and information. In an ideal world, I would develop an online course, deliver regular plain English workshops and maybe even run some sort of membership scheme to help keep the lights on. 

I’ve always loved a good side project. This is definitely a good side project. 

Miscellaneous: other things that happened

I shall finish with a list of notable things that happened in the last 12 months that have nothing to do with work, but are nevertheless personally notable.

• Our identical twin boys both moved into secondary school, but only after starring turns in the end-of-year school performance. We moved house in 2023 and they had to switch school at the start of year six, which was not ideal. But they have handled it all really well. Super proud. 
• Our eight-year-old daughter continues to be the most ridiculously lovely person imaginable and is basically an all-round champion. Brilliant artist. Learning guitar. Makes me tea without asking. Perfect. 
• Our youngest started primary school, which means the lot of them are now in full-time education. A monumental moment. She too has done so well adapting to all the changes and has settled really well.
• In March, I completed my first Audax, which just means a long cycling event that isn’t a race. It was 100km with 2300m of climbing over a few hours and and I loved it. I had grand plans to cycle more. But that didn’t work out because…
• …also in March, I had a vasectomy. I know that’s TMI, but it was very straightforward and we men are generally idiots, so maybe saying it out loud will help someone else make a decision that is likely to benefit their partner more than themselves. 
• We’re very much into the health section of the year now, because also in March (busy month) I got what turned out to be a small hernia in my lower abdomen. It’s still there now, actually. It doesn’t affect me much and I eventually worked out that I could continue to exercise, but that took a while. It’s not the worst thing in the world, just a constant annoyance.
• As are the gall stones I appear to have acquired. How fun it is to be in your mid-40s! If you don’t now much about gall stones, you can be absolutely fine, entirely normal, and then out of nowhere you get, in my case, 10–12 hours of excruciating pain that you can not do anything to alleviate. I had three of these ‘attacks’ in 2024. The last one happened in November and it was so bad I ended up on morphine and in the back of an ambulance for the first time ever. I do not recommend this experience. The waiting list for surgery is unsurprisingly enormous, but I suspect 2025 will see me wave goodbye to my gall bladder entirely. 
• I've got back into Parkrun over the last couple of years and just before the year ended, I managed to beat the personal best I set in... 2011! I did four Parkruns back then and beating that time was on my list of small, slightly pointless targets for 2024.
• Oh, 2024 was the year I officially gave up on Twitter entirely. You don’t need me to tell you all the reasons it is now a genuinely awful place to spend time on the internet, but it really is a shame how things have panned out. Thankfully, the two communities I took notice of on Twitter – the design and publishing worlds – both made a pretty good job of moving to Bluesky after the US election. So I am currently in the process of trying to share more and publish often, even though it no longer comes naturally to me at all. You can follow me on Bluesky, if you fancy. 

Thoughts on 2025

Professionally, 2024 was ace and I am very proud and occasionally amazed that I have reached this point in my freelance career. I worked on meaningful projects with great people for good money. You can’t ask for much more than that. My aim for 2025? More of the same, please. 

I also want to start writing online again (like this!). I have missed publishing my Draft Mode newsletter over the last couple of years, so I intend to start that up again. I don’t want to simply send links to writing-related stuff anymore, so it will be a different format and involve much more of – I’m afraid – me. I’ve got several ideas for pieces. I just need to make the time and space. 

Finally, and perhaps more than anything, I would love to write a post similar to this one at the end of the year and be able to say that I have the first draft of a second book. Could be a novel. Could be anything. But something. 

It’s been a long time since I felt like a published author, but I’ve never given up on the idea of writing books. I’m completely out of practice and it feels a long road back, but the spark is still there and I think I can do it. 

That’s it. Thanks for reading. And well done.