The situation
A political party’s regional organisation works nothing like a company. It has no marketing department; it has volunteers. It has no agency budget; it has an election date. And whatever isn’t finished by that date isn’t worth finishing.
I joined that in 2018 and stayed until the start of 2021.
What it involved
Building and optimising websites for the Karlovy Vary region — from structure and content to load time. A political organisation’s website has spiky traffic: months of quiet, then a single day when more people arrive than in the entire preceding year. That places a completely different demand on hosting and caching than an ordinary company site.
Alongside that, graphics and promotional material. Print has its own rules — bleed, colour space, minimum type sizes. Anyone who has only ever worked for screen learns that the hard way, at the printer.
Campaign work meant deciding where a limited budget should go: what was worth printing, what belonged on social media, and what was merely a nice idea that would reach nobody.
It also included designing and 3D printing promotional models — an unusual part of the job I picked up because nobody else could.
What I took from it
Working against a deadline that genuinely cannot move, with a budget that genuinely cannot grow. Both teach you to decide quickly and to stop doing things that aren’t necessary. That carries over into commercial projects, where the deadline is always theoretically movable — which is exactly why it moves.