Life as a remote worker can be isolating. This is really my only complaint about the work from home setup, which I’ve been doing on and off since 2012. I live in Ithaca, New York which is barely a small city (feels like a large town, really). But there are designers here doing unique creative things. I just don’t see them. Well, I hadn’t seen them in years, until recently.
Back at the end of 2017, Allison and I organized some regular meetups that led to a really cool local design crawl. A bunch of us kept in touch. Twitter and Instagram were slightly less evil (and more usable, somehow). But the pandemic really shut it all down.
Last fall, I met up with another local designer (Coralee!) to talk about starting a new group with a regular meeting cadence. After much back and forth, we decided on the name ToCo Design Rally (ToCo = Tompkins County) and a plan: Third Thursday mornings at our wonderful co-op cafe. I checked with Greenstar ahead of time and not only were they cool with it, they said people do that all the time. Ok great.
So we did it! Our first meeting was back in March, and we just had our second session (early, like, 8:15am) last week. The fact that a dozen people got together before the workday to talk shop and drink coffee is solid proof that we’re all looking for friends and colleagues IRL.
I really only posted on LinkedIn and sent a few emails/messages to some folks who I haven’t seen in a long time. Most of them didn’t show, but others turned up, including some new faces! Will another dozen people come to the May meetup? Who knows, but I’ll be there.
