Jade-Marie Fleuriot is a senior content designer at Nexer Digital.
After working in content design for seven years, she joined Nexer Digital in 2022. Based in Macclesfield and Cambridge, Nexer Digital works in partnership with its clients to design services and digital products to help ‘people live and work better’.
She shares a recent week in her life…
Monday
My alarm hits the depths of my consciousness at 6:15am. I don’t make a habit of getting up this early usually (the benefits of being a remote worker means no commute), but on this day I have decided to get my butt in gear and head to an early morning exercise class. Nothing says ‘wake up, Jade’ faster than trying to balance whilst attempting split squats – the horror! The idea is simple – moving your body is good for your mind too. My job is varied, and I need to feel awake for it.
I’ve returned home, showered, dressed and am at my desk with a coffee in hand by 8am. I’m ready to begin my workday. I start by going through any messages I might have missed on Friday and catching up with any company news.
I’ve been working on some internal resources recently; bringing notes and ideas together to help build some guidance around creating a content strategy. This helps me, but also my fellow content team.
The idea is to start creating some templates to guide us on content strategy and pre-plan workshops for clients. This helps us:
- Be more transparent, so the client knows our processes.
- Estimate how much time it’ll take to complete various steps for the client (I mean, roughly…every client and their needs are different!)
I get a call around 12pm. My colleague wants me to sit in on a client call with him a little later. We’re just having some initial chats on how we can help a client with their website migration. That’s lifting and shifting content from one site to another, not digital things migrating to the south for the winter. We talk content audits, putting some content rules in place for them and helping them to create some content patterns.
I finish the day on a high at 5pm and send the content strategy guidance over to the team to take a look and ask questions.
Tuesday
A more relaxed wake up call this morning. I’m up and sipping on a tea by 7:15am. It was nice to see the sun when I woke up today. So glad the mornings and nights are becoming lighter.
I begin my day at 8am. I was asked to look over some ideas for an accessibility video today. So I spend the morning looking through notes from the client, chatting to our accessibility team and thinking about how to bring some of these topics to life.
It’s been a while since I wrote a script – I had to write a fair few scripts in my previous job to help boost our advice on the website. People digest information in different ways. It’s good to think through the most appropriate content for the task the person wants to complete. And for this specific task, video (along with the captions that run alongside it) will suit the need for different learning styles and personal needs.
I’m halfway through writing the first (very rough) draft of the script in the afternoon when I have to stop for my content design team meeting.
This week my colleague, Justin Darley, is running us through some of his work. He’s been putting together some ace content data dashboards! He loves getting his head into data visualisation, which is a good job, because spreadsheets are not my bag, and he does them so well!
Justin’s passion is an important one. It’s one thing to create content, but you need to see how it’s performing to know what’s working and what isn’t. There’s a story in all those numbers, and it’s waiting to be told!
Wednesday
I carried on with the first draft of the accessibility video today. Once I had that into a messy, but thought through draft one, I sent it over to our accessibility team for review and feedback.
There’s a bit of a tight deadline on the video. So I also met with my colleague, an interaction designer who is helping us pull together some visuals, and another colleague, who will be our videographer. Together, we workshopped how we might start pulling ideas from the script and bringing it all to life.
The workshop was great. It started to help with the structure this will take, the timings, and we were able to devise next steps for our videographer and interaction designer based on ideas, not solely the script. This is so that the script could be edited later after review and as we progress.
At 3pm, I joined our design team meeting. A two hour meeting where the whole of the design team shares what we’re working on. We have some knotty problems to solve and sharing our work in progress is a good way to get input from various specialist roles. And, if anything gets flagged up, we can then work together in relevant groups to resolve any potential issues.
Thursday
It’s getting towards the end of the week, and it’s been one of those where I’ve been jumping around on different tasks. It’s the fun part of being in content design and I love the variety that you get in an agency like Nexer, but it can also take it out of you from time to time. I treated myself to a good breakfast of a kale and cheese omelette – currently my favourite weekday brekkie; healthy, packed with protein and super quick to throw together when you’re in a rush!
Now at my adjustable desk, feeling the late week slump, I pop it into the stand position for the morning. I need to get my energy levels back on side with me. On today’s agenda is:
- Having some chats with our fantastic account and service managers about potential upcoming client projects, and how content can help with their services.
- Finishing up a blog post that I started last week.
The blog post is about how it felt to write our company’s inclusive language guide with my wonderful colleague, Elizabeth Buie. The task of writing the guide itself was a lovely thing to be a part of. It took over a year to complete. Usually this could be written a lot faster, but my colleague and I were on full time placements with clients, which meant little time to get our heads down on internal initiatives. We also needed a lot of time to research, and discuss our findings with our employee resource groups. These are groups formed by our employees that cover topics such as diversity, LGBTQ+ and accessibility.
For the blog post I really wanted a way to express how I felt writing sensitive content. We usually like to work with subject experts and researchers to help us understand our users, their journeys and their behaviour. Whereas inclusive language is often very personal. What one person likes to use to describe themself, another may not. You will inevitably be writing about something that is not your own personal experience, and, quite frankly, that’s scary! I wanted a way to express this in the blog post.
Using my idol, Brené Brown, I focused my post on the need to be vulnerable, to truly open yourself up to challenge and difficult conversations.
Having finished this up by the end of the day, I then wrote a LinkedIn post to go along with it and sent it over to our wonderful Marketing and Events Manager, Cat Cutmore, to be published on our site and posted on LinkedIn.
Friday
It’s Friday! Cue all the happy Friday GIFs your team can think up. I’m feeling excited and ready for the weekend.
I start my day by touching base with our managing director, Hilary Stephenson. We’ve been having some really good discussions as of late about a new employee resource group (ERG) we would like to set up at Nexer.
The group is for people who need advice and support on reproductive health issues, such as endometriosis, PCOS, fertility (including fertility treatments), and the menopause.
With the idea approved and ready to go ahead, I make a start on writing comms to invite colleagues to join. Then I begin some thinking around sessions, and any way we can help our team at Nexer feel supported through whatever they’re going through.
I find so many useful resources whilst I’m researching. Companies like Endometriosis UK, who are doing some incredible work highlighting the condition, supporting those who are diagnosed with it, and campaigning for change at policy level.
Now I’ve set up the new ERG Teams group, and the comms are out to get things started, I turn my attention to some client work we’re doing. This is for some online training solutions.
We’re in the initial stages of the work, so I’m just researching and reading through the relevant material and getting familiar with what they need.
I meet with our lead content designer, Justin, and we discuss potential ways to tackle the brief and next steps. We begin to map out ideas and ideate over what content might be needed at which touch points. It’s a great, creative way to end the week. And what a week it’s been!
