Practice

Most worthwhile things don’t happen all at once. They emerge through repetition, small improvements, false starts, and returning to the work again and again. Practice isn’t just about building skill, but about paying attention over time. These posts explore that slower process of learning, making, and gradually becoming better at something without always noticing it in the moment.

Making Strategy Untangling

All essays in Practice

  1. Bringing things to life 8th of July 2026 I’ve always imagined them as little sketches rather than photographs. Partly because they give me an excuse to draw, but mostly because I think they communicate the ideas better.
  2. A decade of Bold Wise 22nd of April 2026 Bold Wise passed the ten-year mark this month, which felt worth stopping for. Looking back, the work has taken different forms, but the thread through it has stayed pretty consistent: helping businesses make sense of complexity and come across more clearly.
  3. The simple joy of iterating 16th of April 2026 It suddenly struck me that I'm free to play with my websites, to test out ideas, explore techniques, think and re-think things. And thats just what I've been doing.
  4. Easy, facile answer machines 10th of March 2026 My problem with AI is that design, strategy, and consultancy depend on awkward questions, uncomfortable truths, and human judgement, not just easy answers.
  5. Launching Bold Wise Studio 29th of August 2025 I’ve split my practice into two clear parts: Bold Wise for direction and strategy, and Bold Wise Studio for delivery, design, and making ideas real.
  6. Writing to think 27th of May 2022 I've been thinking a lot about why I write here, and what I get out of it, and I’ve realised it’s a handful of things.
  7. Terrible, boring and hard 25th of May 2022 There’s at least one phase in pretty much everything I work on where things seem insurmountable. Where they are just terrible, boring and hard.
  8. Repositioning Bold Wise 23rd of May 2022 My work had shifted from hands-on design toward consultancy, strategy, and shaping bigger, more ambitious projects, so Bold Wise needed to change too.
  9. Alphabetising the recycling 17th of May 2022 Alphabetising your recycling is such a perfect way of describing those activities that seem, on the face of them, useful and productive but, as you dig in you realise that they are just busy-work.
  10. Friction and inaction 11th of May 2022 For the past (checks last post date) six or so months, I've posted nothing here. In that time, though, I've been busier than ever. So what gives?
  11. Bug fix 17th of February 2021 Today, in a handful of lines of pretty much copied and pasted code, I solved a bug that’s been plaguing a client site for months - if not years.
  12. Pause, regroup, take stock 7th of August 2020 I've now been self-employed or run my own business for over a decade. That means I've spent longer working for myself than I have in all of my previous in-house roles combined.
  13. The surprise twenty minute run 25th of July 2020 I recently completed Couch to 5k. Over (about) nine weeks, it took me from not running at all to running five kilometres in thirty minutes.
  14. The unknown knowns 9th of July 2020 Last month I suddenly realised I knew far more about a topic than I'd previously thought. This got me thinking about those unknown knowns — the things we don't realise we already know or understand.
  15. Switching to Jekyll 8th of July 2020 I just switched this site over to Jekyll. If you'd visited this site early yesterday evening then you wouldn't have noticed a single change — and that was my goal.
  16. Design is uncomfortable 28th of May 2020 Design is uncomfortable. At least I frequently find it uncomfortable. Anyone who has sat in front of a blank page will know something of this.
  17. Perfect is the enemy of good 17th of January 2020 Launching boldwise.co.uk taught me that progress beats perfection, and that a good site can grow into something better once it finally exists.
  18. A cry for craft 9th of October 2015 I've been thinking recently about stats driven design. This is where site, or page, usage patterns inform the position, style and contrast of elements to, for example, increase the number of people who sign up for some service.

© Alex Magill