I‘ve been looking forward to publishing this episode of Unfinished Business for over a month and I looked forward to recording it for even longer, because I got to talk about art direction and creativity on the web with two of the creative people that I respect most, Dan Mall and Jeffrey Zeldman.

The best podcasts listen to interesting people having interesting conversations about work, and life and for episode 104 of Unfinished Business I’m joined by two fascinating folk. Trent Walton and Stephen Hay.

Back for episode 103 of Unfinished Business is my favourite comedy duo, ‘Pipe and Pyjamas,’ Paul Boag and Jon Hicks.

A little later than advertised (and by “a little” I actually mean a week) I’m joined on Unfinished Business. Episode 102 by Rachel Andrew and Zoe Mickley Gillenwater.

We’re back. Back in business. Unfinished Business. Episode 101. For this, the first episode of 2015, I’m joined by two of the best well-known writers about how to implement CSS on a large scale Harry Roberts and Jonathan Snook.

If you’re a fan of my Unfinished Business podcast, you’ve only a few more weeks to wait until the next episode. It will be back (with episode 101) on the ninth of February and when it does, things will be a little different.

This week is the one-hundredth episode of Unfinished Business and who better to join me than the person who helped me start it all, almost two years ago, Anna Debenham. We celebrate by talking about what went right and wrong in 2014 and our resolutions for 2015. Then we talk about meetings and how we can improve them.

This being the final episode of the year, I’d like to say an enormous thank-you to everyone I’ve spoken to on Unfinished Business, this year: Ashley Baxter, Benjamin Hollway, Brendan Dawes, Christopher Murphy, Cole Henley, Clare Symons, Harry Roberts, Jeremy Keith, John Davey, Jon Hicks, Jory Raphael, Laura Kalbag, Liz Elcoate, Paul Boag, Rachel Andrew, Relly Annett-Baker, Sara Souidan, Sean Johnson and Trent Walton.

I’d also like to say thank-you to all the companies who’ve helped make Unfinished Business possible through their sponsorship. Antetype, BigBoard, dConstruct, DeviceLab, DotYork, Espresso, GatherContent, Ghostlab, Forge, Hover, Logical Elements, Native Summit, ShropGeek, Simply FixIt and Shopify. I want to say a special thanks to Perch and Perch Runway for supporting the show from our very first episode. Please continue to support Unfinished Business by supporting them.

Unfinished Business will be back in February 2015 and I hope you’ll all join me then. Until then, thanks for listening and I’d like to wish everyone a happy Christmas holiday and a prosperous new year.

Conference impresario John Davey joins me again on Unfinished Business this week. We talk about anticipation and scarceness, how some cinemas create an experience around watching a film, how looking at album artwork in a record shop enhanced the experience of buying music and whether the experiences we’ve lost were valuable enough to revive in new and different ways.

It’s a special week this week on Unfinished Business as I’m joined by not one, but two regular co-hosts, Ashley Baxter and Laura Kalbag. In a bumper episode, we talk about cakes, brightly coloured fizzy drinks and Yorkshire pudding burgers. We discuss podcasting, sounding good as a podcast guest, then whether we allow Christmas decorations in our offices. Finally we talk about what we’ve achieved this year and what our goals are for 2015. It’s a fast and fun episode. I think you’ll really enjoy it.

People sometimes ask me about what I listen for when I’m choosing guests to talk with on Unfinished Business.

Artist and designer Brendan Dawes is back on Unfinished Business this week. We get started by talking about past popular pop princes and princesses S Club 7, The Handsome Family and Bren’s one day trip to Argentina. For the remainder of the show, we talk about when it’s acceptable to give our time for free and when we should say no? Why every project should include a ‘goodwill’ budget and what the heck are those party paper and whistle things that come out of Christmas crackers called?

A complete change of subject for this week’s Unfinished Business, Relly Annett-Baker and I talk about parenting and education and specifically how she’s homeschooling her two young children.

This week on Unfinished Business, Paul Boag, Jon Hicks and I dispense with any pretence that this is a show about business and spend 90 minutes talking about something much more interesting. Peter Capaldi’s first series as Doctor Who. We talk about our thoughts on Peter Capaldi’s Doctor and the best (and worst) episodes of the season. Then we finish up by discussing the series finale, Clara and Danny Pink and of course Missy. If you haven’t seen the final episode of this season, there are spoilers galore.

The week’s Unfinished Business was recorded live at The Web Is… conference in Cardiff, as part of Geek Mental Help week. I was joined on-stage by Christopher Murphy, Cole Henley, Relly Annett-Baker and Dr. Clare Symons to talk about a wide range of mental heath and mental illness issues.

I put the lower audio quality this week down to everyone wearing lapel, not using condenser microphones, (sorry about that,) but recording live in front of an audience was fun, and I’ll definitely do it again. Thanks to Craig and Amie Lockwood for recording this episode from the mixing desk for me.

There are no sponsors this week, as it didn’t seem appropriate.

This week is Geek Mental Help week and on Unfinished Business I’m joined by Liz Elcoate, one of the people who helped to spark the idea. We ask if our industry attracts people with issues or cause them, does our working environment add our problems and what we hope the outcomes from this week will be? But not before we talk sport, Liz’s obsession with wrestling and my Uncle Haystacks.

Brighton-based developer Benjamin Hollway loves a burger in a brioche bun and joins me on Unfinished Business this week to talk about how young people feel excluded from some industry events and how conferences and meet-ups should cater for people who don’t want to or are too young to drink. Benjamin was shortlisted for ‘emerging talent of the year’ at the Net Awards and oh, did I mention that he’s only sixteen?

Designer and artist Brendan Dawes is back on episode 90 of Unfinished Business this week to talk about his recent commission by Mailchimp, Six Monkeys, which explores interactions with email through physical objects named after six famous chimpanzees. Before that though, we talk more about what’s happening with Geek Mental Help Week, including whether the word ‘geek’ takes something away from the project and is somehow derogatory.

This week’s an emotional episode of Unfinished Business. After talking about why a burger in a donut should never, ever have become a thing, Laura Kalbag and I discuss mental health issues in our industry. We talk about my own struggles with depression and depersonalisation disorder, issues that stem from my father’s own mental health issues and suicide.

This week on Unfinished Business, Harry Roberts and I have some pretty big, Boag-shaped, boots to fill after last week’s episode. Harry takes the opposite view to Paul about sharing personal struggles in a work context and worries about the impression that sharing give to prospective clients. Then we talk about how clients’ commissioning process for creative services is largely broken, the differences between an open conversation starter, an RFP and a brief and how we, as designers and developers, can help clients to commission what we do better.

This week on Unfinished Business, I had planned to talk with Paul Boag about client briefs and managing expectations. But when we sat down to talk, we were both in the mood to talk about something much, more personal. We discussed how we feel about how Twitter has changed, Erin Kissane’s ‘Ditching Twitter,’ Dan Edwards’ ‘Treading through treacle’ and our general sense of melancholy about our industry. Then we talk about how, contrary to what we often hear, our industry is filled with acts of kindness.

We discuss how we maintain our optimism and the steps we take to protect ourselves emotionally. If you think you know Paul and I from our public personas, I think that you’ll be very surprised by this episode. If you haven’t listened to Unfinished Business for a while (or at all) I urge you to listen this week.

We don’t develop with Wordpress, I’ve never used Wordpress and I can’t see myself starting this late in the game. So I was surprised when Troy Dean asked me to talk with him on his WP Elevation podcast. I was sure that he’d confused me with someone else, but he convinced me that he hadn’t and we spent a fun hour talking about designing content/mobile first, why we write content for our clients and ultimately why I don’t use Wordpress.

Troy normally hosts video podcasts, but my internet connection is so poor at home that we had to switch to audio only. We recorded at 8:30am so that was probably a blessing. If you’re not already sick of the sound of my voice on Unfinished Business, I think you might enjoy this one.

In the second part of our icon designer double bill, this week on Unfinished Business, I’m joined by designer, illustrator the and iconographer behind Symbolicons, Jory Raphael. We talk about how we feel about the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus announcement, the design of the Apple Watch software and whether it looks at home on the watch’s hardware. We discuss Jory’s illustration work including his artwork for the 5by5 podcast network and of course, those long shadows. Finally we talk about making a business from making and selling icons.

Icon designer Jon Hicks joins me this week on Unfinished Business to discuss our experiences of recent conferences including dConstruct (me) and An Event Apart (him.) We narrowly avoid talking about our predictions for the upcoming Apple event and instead discuss how to keep work and home life separate, whether it‘s right to be connected to work outside work hours and how having an office can help with work/life balance.

Of course, all of this is just a thinly disguised ruse for what we really want to talk about, Doctor Who. In the after-show section, we look back at Matt Smith’s final episode, talk about Peter Capaldi’s new Doctor so far and if Doctor Who needs longer than one hour per episode to tell a good story. Oh. And Clara bloody Oswald.

This week on Unfinished Business, I’m joined by Cole Henley, technical director at Mud. We discuss his latest Freelance rates survey, how the results have changed over the last three years and what he’s learned from making the survey. I admire Cole’s Mud very much, so we talk about how to grow a business, when to hire new people and the importance of regular advice from someone on the outside. If you like the business side of Unfinished Business, you’ll love this episode.

What’s an episode of Unfinished Business without some talk of comics or films? In an after-show special, starting at 1:11:30, Cole and I talk about vintage 2000AD comics, Harlem Heroes, Flesh and of course, Judge Dredd. I want to know if Stallone’s Judge Dredd film a guilty pleasure and why, oh why, doesn’t Hollywood make films from classic 2000AD stories?