Year in Review — 2024
The highs and lows of the year in exhaustive detail.
This is going to be a long post. I’ve broken it up into a few sections, so if one is of greater interest, just hop to it.
Overview
What a year! Most people I know didn’t like 2024. I think at this point I can honestly say I’m neutral.
Like any year, it had its ups and downs, met some expectations and dashed others, surprised, delighted, saddened and horrified. The partial eclipse back in April would come to symbolize the year: a wave of darkness falling short of the light.
We almost lost our pup this year. She received a terminal diagnosis and we had in-home euthanasia scheduled more than once. But we always felt that something was off. We kept rescheduling; she got better. She has lived to see her 14th birthday and is more than halfway to her 15th now. I’m glad we trusted ourselves on this one.
We lost a chicken this year, the one our daughter named Pundy. She’d had a rough time being at the bottom of the pecking order, and I can’t help but feel like she just gave up. Poor thing.
We’re planning on expanding the brood in the spring.
The family thrived in all the ways that matter. Our children are healthy, happy, curious, and active. They don’t seem to need a normal amount of sleep and have a voracious appetite for all manner of input, so their introverted parents are often weary. Though they are nearly five years apart in age, both have much to teach the other and enjoy spending time together enough to actually do that. On the first day of their winter break, I watched out the window as they sat together in a wagon in our back yard talking for nearly two hours. That is a new level of bond that I’m glad to see.
At Work
This was my twentieth year at Newfangled. Multi-decade tenures are nearly unheard of among my generation, and yet, there are three of who have been working on Newfangled at least that long. When newer team members ask me why I have remained as long as I have, I say this: Over my twenty years, I have rarely thought of myself as working for a company and almost always as working on one.
None of the three of us (Mark, Dave, and I) who are Newfangled’s current longest-termers started the company; our founder left four years into my tenure, back in 2008. Four years prior, I joined his company with an entrepreneurial drive and I’ve never let it go. As a result, Newfangled has been a platform for my career, not just a job. I’ve played many different roles in my time, gaining new skills and facing new challenges on a pretty regular basis. And from the platform of Newfangled, I’ve written for other websites and magazines, published a book, spoken at and directed conferences, created podcasts, and done a variety of independent design and consulting. It’s nearly impossible for me to think of myself as having done the same thing for twenty years because I haven’t.
This, my twentieth year, with its unprecedented challenges and novelty, has been a fitting anniversary. I’ve gained new skills, renewed old ones, wiped slates clean and created new ones. In our last leadership meeting, each one of us said in some way or another, “I’m tired.” Yeah, well, we created an entirely new company while also recalibrating – once again — the old one! Of course we’re tired. But I sincerely feel that it’s good to be cyclically challenged throughout one’s career, to face those challenges with all the energy you can muster; to be exhausted, hopefully, is to have met them.
As I write this, I’m mid-way through our annual end-of-year two-week holiday closure, and boy did I need it. But I’m already rested enough to look back on the last 52 weeks with some pride and an immense amount of gratitude. And as for the on vs. for distinction, I’ve come around on for. The company is bigger than its people, many of whom have come and gone. And so as long as I am one of them, I work for it — for its health, for its longevity, and for its people.
That’s why I have to be real about the failures. We ended 2023 with a historically large profit projection for 2024. As soon as the year began, so did the account cancelations. We saw more in 2024 than we ever had before. Why? The economy was lousy for our clientele and AI had put a chilling effect on much — if not all — future account planning. We held on and spent the entirety of our profit retaining our people and incubating a new business. It was worth it — every last penny. We all agreed on this — that giving up profit distribution was worthwhile if we could continue to pay the people we worked with, depended upon, and cared for. The cancellations slowed and the new business launched well. But even so, we weren’t able to get to a point where we could project 2025 without losses unless we reduced the size of our team by 8. And so, in December of all months, we did. Among them were two designers from my team, whom I love dearly and miss daily. I’m glad we were able to delay this as long as we did; I’m simultaneously saddened that we couldn’t avoid it altogether. Yes, the deck was stacked against us, and yes, it is necessary to preserve the operation itself. But nothing changes the fact that saying goodbye to people who have only ever done good work is a tragedy. My only hope is that 2025 can make it right, somehow.
That takes care of 2025 work goals.
Highlights of the Year
Magnolia
As mentioned above, Newfangled created Magnolia this year. An entirely new business.
I personally designed the Magnolia identity, website, and interface with support from my team. This collection of work takes its place among the outstanding output of our design team this year.
I’m proud of all of it and them.
Art
I spent more time in my visual journal this year than I have in many years. It’s been a blast. Some tiny samples above; you can browse them in more detail here.
Art making with the kids has been fun this year, too. It’s been such a joy to see them discover things on their own and exhibit a drive to express themselves visually in a variety of ways.
Isaac has joined Sue in dinosaur obsession, and has produced many portraits of his favorites.
Sue has been prolific as ever. She often brings home artwork from school that surprises me. This is a particularly enigmatic piece!
Reading
Of the 29 books I finished this year, 15 were fiction. This is a bit more than usual for me. But of my top 5 — not my highest rated, but the ones that now, at the end of the year, stand out most — only one is non-fiction. I think this is probably because of (1) poor choices on my part, and (2) the need to escape from reality this year.
So, these are my top five books of 2024. These are the books (with one exception — Not My Problem is a piece of short fiction published in Noema) that I’m still thinking about because they’ve challenged me in an unexpected and lasting way.
| Title | Author | Genre | ||
| 1 |
|
I Who Have Never Known Men | Jacqueline Harpman |
Fiction
|
| 2 |
|
Project 8200: UFO/UAP Bases and Activities: The original Remote Viewing Transcripts | Frederick H. Atwater |
Non Fiction
|
| 3 |
|
The Divine Comedy: The Inferno, the Purgatorio, the Paradiso | Dante Alighieri |
Fiction
|
| 4 |
|
Hum | Helen Philips |
Fiction
|
| 4 |
|
Not My Problem | Tim Maughan |
Short Fiction
|
Below is the full list of books I read in 2024.
Music
2024 was a good year for music! These are the albums that stood out for me, very loosely ranked.
| Title | Artist | Genre | ||
| 1 |
|
All Born Screaming | St. Vincent |
Pop/Rock
|
| 2 |
|
Three | Four Tet |
Electronic
|
| 3 |
|
Lives Outgrown | Beth Gibbons |
Pop/Rock
|
| 4 |
|
It’s Inside You | Candy |
Metal
|
| 5 |
|
Breaking Stretch | Patricia Brennan Septet |
Jazz
|
| 6 |
|
Small Medium Large | SML |
Jazz
|
| 7 |
|
Absolute Elsewhere | Blood Incantation |
Metal
|
| 8 |
|
The Dream of Delphi | Bat for Lashes |
Pop/Rock
|
| 9 |
|
Meaning’s Edge EP | Djrum |
Electronic
|
| 10 |
|
The Collective | Kim Gordon |
Pop/Rock
|
| 11 |
|
Moon Healer | Job for a Cowboy |
Metal
|
| 12 |
|
Lust for Gold | Starflyer 59 |
Pop/Rock
|
| 13 |
|
What An Enormous Room | Torres |
Pop/Rock
|
| 14 |
|
Cloudward | Mary Halvorson |
Jazz
|
| 15 |
|
Shorthand | Anna Clyne |
Classical
|
| 16 |
|
Meridians | Fuubutsushi |
Ambient
|
| 17 |
|
The Way Out of Easy | Jeff Parker ETA IVtet |
Jazz
|
| 18 |
|
Sons of ___ | SABIWA |
Electronic
|
DIY Projects
I was pretty busy this year. I set a few ambitious goals at the start of the year that I (somehow) managed to complete.
(This list is really for me — I’ve been tracking these projects on my /now page for all of 2024 and will be clearing out that page when 2025 starts.)
| Project | Location | Status | |
| 1 | Design and build temporary desk riser | Office |
Done Jan 20
|
| 2 | build spacer frames for media library shelf | Den |
Done Jan 21
|
| 3 | Build and hang ceiling acoustic panels | Office |
Done Feb 19
|
| 4 | Build door-mounted tool panel | Office |
Done Feb 24
|
| 5 | Build new office shelving | Office |
Done Jun 14
|
| 6 | Build new shelving and reorganize Isaac’s room | Isaac’s bedroom |
Done Oct 21
|
| 7 | Add shelf to kitchen work area | Kitchen |
Done Oct 23
|
| 8 | Rewire office for daily shutdown | Office |
Done Oct 23
|
| 9 | Remodel basement and set up preparedness facility. This has been the biggest project; it took me the entire year and sixty 2”x4”s. Dedicated post about this forthcoming. | Basement |
Done Nov 10
|
Next
You can’t summarize a year on a webpage or a list. When I make something like this, I feel that acutely, that fine line between self-indulgent detail and scant platitudes that no one needs to see. In truth, I do this mostly for myself — it’s an accounting that I find useful, and one I hope might offer something of use to you, too.
If it did, I’d love to hear about it. I’d also love to hear about your year. Hit me up at butler.christopher@proton.me.
Written by Christopher Butler on
Tagged