January and February: so good at seeming unending. There are few good days, few clear days, because mostly the sky is like a silver lid pressing down on us. It’s a hard drag until the clocks change. Keeping busy at work helped. The new team – the Dennis Media Factory – is getting going, although I always forget how hiring just tends to take ages.

We went to New York right after new year to kick off this year’s biggest project, but there’s a long way to go with it. In early February, I spent a very enjoyable and intense 10 day period on the design for what will be our first app, and here I was lucky to find a terrific UX expert to mastermind the process, an old colleague I bumped into a Windows Phone 7 event. It was great to actually get out of meetings and strategising and start the sketching and questioning, plotting and planning for an actual product.