Posts about Blogging

For one year, I wrote in my design portfolio’s blog almost every week. The first 40 weeks or so, I wrote updates on the work and shared a little bit of stuff that caught my eye around the web (example). The next dozen weeks, I tired to share some insights into design strategy that I’ve learned over time (example).

Simultaneously, I ran an email newsletter, and shared each post to LinkedIn. 

After running these experiments for a year, it brings me a small of amount of shame to report that it has been entirely fruitless. I have nine email subscribers. One is me. One is my wife. Six are friends of mine that I know personally. That’s eight total. So what that really means is that this work has produced one subscriber.

Additionally, it has resulted in no work from LinkedIn. No leads. No ​“connections” (gross). Etc.

I don’t mean to sound like a crybaby. That’s not the point. But this didn’t work, and it’s time to go back to the drawing board.

I have two blogs — this one and my portfolio. But I run a one-man design studio, so I’ve never been sure how to differentiate content between these two sites. Common sense says that I ought to post everything on the portfolio, and let my true self shines through, but that feels gross to me — I think because the portfolio isn’t a personal site. It’s a business site. And perhaps that distinction is silly, but it feels important. I don’t think I want this post to appear on my portfolio, for example.

It feels to me like this is the site where I figure things out, and the portfolio is for what things look like when they’re done. But I don’t know how that plays into a blogging strategy.

It’s possible that the portfolio blog should be exclusively focused on the work. Blog posts are minor work, case studies are major work, etc. That’s meritorious, but it feels too corporate for my liking. 

It’s also possible the portfolio doesn’t need a blog at all. But blogging has merit: my client found me through my personal site, and didn’t care what was in my portfolio. (His opening line in our first meeting was ​“I read your review of the new MacBook Pros and really liked it.”)

I’ve always been a fan of Austin Kleon’s Show Your Work, and have to admit that I’m disappointed the behind-the-scenes approach didn’t bear much fruit. If it works, it attracts a lot of designers, but sharing what you know is a great way to learn yourself, and it’s also a great way to demonstrate bits and pieces of the work along the way. Those posts can then form the foundation of case studies later.

I’m not attempting to become a famous blogger, but it would be nice to build some traction with this work. The great thing about toiling in obscurity is that your mistakes aren’t as visible. The difficult thing about toiling in obscurity is a lack of feedback. For all I know, the BTS stuff was great, but nobody saw it. Tree in the woods and all that.

My point with all this is that I’ve been thinking about this for over a year and don’t have any answers. If you have thoughts on this, I would love to hear them. 

Sometimes we are so close to our own problems we can’t see the solutions right in front of our face.

After her WordPress site was consecutively hacked and scraped by bots, Winnie Lim writes about how running a personal website is not fun anymore:

It takes spiritual energy to create, maintain and produce personal projects. At the core, these projects exists because there is a belief in some sense of shared humanity. I write because I believe someone out there resonates with my experiences. But when everything starts to be about speed, utility and power, life becomes a dehumanising experience. Why should I take the time and effort — the deep meditative state I need to reach to translate my inner experiences into coherent words — when AI bots just scrape everything? And someone out there is probably typing a prompt and getting responses in 0.001 seconds without giving a single thought about the human energy that is powering that response.

I get it.

What a beautiful way to describe the act of creating something for other people. Making something for others requires a belief in our shared humanity. I love that.

I don’t know if I agree that running a personal website isn’t fun anymore. I’d simply say: never bet against the blog.

To me, having your own website and blogging feels more vital than ever. A good personal website — one that doesn’t look and read like slop — is a differentiator now. In that sense alone, having a little website for yourself feels important.

But the real strong feeling I have probably stems from a youth spent playing in a metal band and hanging out in the hardcore and punk scenes a lot: screw the man, man. I don’t lose a lot of sleep over bots scraping my site. You can’t fight what’s coming (RIP Cormac McCarthy). Yet I look around and I see a lot of old-timers leaving the scene. Just the other day I saw a thread of developers on Mastodon talking about how they were changing careers entirely; some were becoming nurses, some were getting into the trades, and some were making plans to get out while the going is good.

Similarly, a lot of people have stopped blogging. My RSS feed is drier than ever. (I guess I’m implying that my RSS feed was wet at one point? Sounds gross. But you know what I mean).

I don’t think humans want to see less cool stuff than before. This is a generational sea change.

I grew up in a mob-run town (it was very safe for that reason; don’t poop where you eat and all that). 

One of the things I learned about the mob is that they have a purge every decade or two to get rid of the bad blood. It’s The Godfather, basically. Assassinations, hits, all that stuff. 

I learned the general pattern for recognizing mob warfare, so when my wife and I later lived in Toronto and there was a shooting at the same restaurant down the street from our condo twice in one week, I could say with 100% certainty that this was a good old-fashioned mafia purge.

It feels like the same thing is happening on the internet with a generation of designers and developers. They’re all really smart people, but they either feel too young, too old, or too risk-averse to deal with the industry changing anymore.

I’m not trying to imply that’s who Winnie is and what she’s thinking. I don’t know her. But I have seen this sentiment expressed many times in the past twelve months.

My point is this: if your peers all leave a scene, you can view that as a warning, or you can recognize that you have the entire market to yourself.

So it goes with blogging: if you have the stomach to scream into the void, this is a vital time to share your thoughts freely on the internet.

I think a lot of it has to do with motivation. If you write for other people, and it feels like those people have disappeared, why bother continuing? 

But I write for me. I write to figure things out. I write to practice critical thinking and I share because I’m a nerd. I’m under no illusions of my own importance. Publishing is the exercise that takes this from a vanity journal to a creative practice — something that involves showing up and putting in the time to make something, even when it’s hard, even when nobody is listening, even when bots are the core audience. Because who cares? Bots won’t always be the core audience, nobody is listening until one day when a lot of people are listening, and it gets easier the more often you do it.

All that to say pull your pirate flag out of storage, be a rebel, screw the man, and blog like your life depended on it. I think it’s more vital than ever.

Twelve years ago felt like a golden age for indie bloggers. Shawn Blanc had just gone full-time independent and was writing up a storm. Austin Kleon posted the slides that ended up becoming *Steal Like an Artist*. The Great Discontentposted their first interview (with Dan Rubin). The Verge was still called This is My Next. John Siracusa was still writing 50,000 word macOS reviews.

The community was growing behind the web, too. Frank Chimero wrote a lot more then, and eventually a lot of what he wrote became The Shape of Design in 2012. Also in 2012, Kai Brach crowdfunded the first issue of Offscreen Magazine.

Maybe this is nostalgia. In 2011, I started freelancing and was actively seeking my tribe. For me, it was a magical time to be online. TGD was how I heard of all the designers I count now as inspiration. It gave me the confidence to explore my path. And Shawn Blanc quitting his job to blog full-time was an aha moment for me. Austin Kleon shone a light on how to do your best creative work (and continues to do so; he’s the best). Frank and Kai proved that there was still space and interest in sharing something deeper and more philosophical online.

Is there a community of people like this in 2023? Who is today’s Shawn Blanc? Who else is shining a light like Austin Kleon?

The newest additions to my list of must-read bloggers are Matt Birchler and Nick Heer. But I’m still looking for the next generation of creative pros and artists who remind us why we get up every morning and make stuff.

Who’s making food for the creative soul?