Blog format change

When I started this blog in early 2015, I had some goals in mind. The blog I had before this one (now deprecated) was difficult to maintain. I used to write dense design breakdowns with lots of images that I either spent a lot of time hunting for or diligently annotating in Photoshop. These took a really long time to write. I wanted to pivot to a text-only blog where I could quickly dump thoughts without obsessing too much over the structure, flow, narrative, content, image accessibility & resolution, SEO, and a slew of other things that come with putting “stuff” up on the internet. And I did exactly that. This new blog has been exactly what I hoped it would be, a place to easily get my thoughts and ideas out into the world without the added layers of proofreading or reorganization. I think of a topic, I write a few paragraphs about it, hope that it morphs into some kind of cohesive summary of my thoughts, and hit publish. It’s been working well. But as with everything, things evolve over time.

Back in 2015, I was still fresh as a designer. I had many part-time design gigs before, but I started my first full-time design “job” in early 2015. It felt real. Almost every designer I knew had an online presence with some kind of blog where they put out their thoughts into the world. They shared resources, tips, thoughts & musings on design, and even posted about random other topics. I felt like I needed one too. I enjoyed writing about design and already had a blog before this focused on proving that I can “think” like a designer. Now that I was an actual designer, I wanted to show that I can “grow” as a designer. And hence began this blog, full with all the learnings and failures of the past blog, setup in a way where it was extremely easy for me to write and publish.

In the first couple of years, I was all over the place. I was writing about really random things and whatever thoughts I had at that moment in time. But I found that the thoughts didn’t come to me consistently. One month, I could have seven different blog posts but the next month, I’d only have one. My mind wasn’t good at keeping a stable rhythm with the posts, and life often got in the way too. I was questioning how seriously I should take this blog, if I should keep it professional or just post everything that I can think of. I took the latter approach, and it’s worked out well for me so far. I’ve written about design, tech, video games, art, travel, life, and much more.

A couple of years into the blog, I started getting into a pattern. I noticed that I could comfortably write three or so posts in a month, take a break for a month, and then write three more posts the next month. The month break helped me mentally reset and gave space for life to happen so that I had new and interesting things to write about. I wasn’t constantly fussing over questions like what my next post should be about or if I had an interesting perspective to offer on the latest hot topic. Instead, I just stuck to this schedule of three posts a month, every other month, and it’s been working out for me great since 2017.

But as the years went on, this too started faltering. I started to simply run out of things to write about. I had already shared my deep philosophical musings about pretty much everything I wanted to share, so I fell into a new rhythm of writing about one design related topic, my thoughts on a video game I played, and one generic post about life for the three posts I needed to hit every other month. This was fruitful for a while, but then also got old and boring quickly. There’s only so much I can gush about in a video game I played and only so many times I can repeat the same cyclical conversations about design. The blog now started to feel like an obligation.

I even started to question if I needed this blog anymore. I’ve certainly grown a lot as a designer since 2017, and if that was the purpose of keeping up with this blog, haven’t I already accomplished that? What was the point of continuing to keep writing? Besides, I don’t really advertise this blog much. I’ve cross-linked to it from my main site, but aside from that, everyone who reads these posts are people who are interested in what I have to say. I know maybe a handful of folks in real life who regularly read my blog posts (thanks y’all) along with a few other people that I’ve only ever known online. Would they really care if I stopped writing? The answer to all these existential questions was obvious. I should keep writing if I wanted to keep writing.

I enjoy the act of writing and putting my thoughts out into the world. I like constructing sentences, using witty adjectives or phrasing descriptions cleverly, and like surprising the reader with an unexpected syllable here and there. Besides, writing has made me a much better designer. Being able to communicate my thoughts in written form is such a handy complementary skillset to that of communicating the thoughts visually. Often, I’ll just write a carefully constructed Slack message instead of mocking up an idea that I know clearly wouldn’t work. I’ll re-write the message four or five times and send it. Some recipients have acknowledged how convincing and well-written the message was. I’ve also noticed my abilities to construct influential emails improve as a result of writing often. Taken completely out of its professional usefulness, I still find writing to be a highly effective way of working through my thoughts. I’ll sometimes feel strongly about something but once I start writing about it, I start questioning my perspective. I’ll reframe my thinking or explore an alternative angle. It helps me work through analyzing how I really feel about something and helps me get to know myself better.

Even if I wanted to keep writing, the problem of “What do I write about?” kept nagging me in the back of my head. I was getting bored of writing about the same stuff and needed a fresh change. I then read John Green’s The Anthropocene Reviewed earlier this year. I had already listened to this in podcast form, but reading the book was even more rewarding. I was captivated by the way John Green is able to describe mundane everyday objects with charm, wit, and sophistication. He imbues an object as everyday as a Sycamore tree with his personal experiences, what it means to the world at large, and how it affects us as humans and as living things in general. He focuses on the “anthropocene” and talks about things — whether it’s the Indy 500 or a lake or a song or an insect — from the perspective of humans in context of the world we exist in. It’s a whimsical, absurd, and entertaining read involving philosophical rambles, deeply personal stories, explorations of societal problems, and the human capacity to create wonderful things while at the same time destroying wonderful things.

And I was inspired by his writing. I was so inspired that I decided to try out writing the way he does, taking a really random topic and writing about it with a similar style of prose that manages to be engaging and informative at the same time, weaving personal tales into the broader context of how that thing exists in the world. A good John Green anthropocene reviewed story keeps you hooked, wanting to know more about why a certain type of beaver is so important and where he’s going with this tale of a very specific football match. It doesn’t matter if you’re not familiar with the topic, he’ll provide all the context you need to know. You keep reading because you’re into his writing style, and you’ll read no matter what he writes.

So that’s what’s next for this blog. I’m going to be writing mini-essays about random things in a deeper, more introspective level of detail, not unlike how John Green writes about them. Eagle eyed readers may have noticed that I’ve already started doing this with a few posts in the past few months. The blog posts titled Selfies, Doors, and The Moon were all experiments in this kind of writing. I wanted to test the waters to see if I could actually write in an engaging way about something before committing to doing them. These posts take much longer to put together because I do a fair bit of research, structure the content, re-write and re-phrase many sentences until I’m happy with them, and try to make it more entertaining where I can. I’m happy with how they turned out, and I’m excited to keep honing this style of writing mini-essays even more next year.

Given that these take much longer to work on, I’ll be scrapping the three-posts-a-month, every-other-month patten that I’ve semi-religiously stuck to for the past five or so years. Instead, I’ll be putting out a few mini-essays throughout the course of the 2023. I don’t know how many is a sensible amount to commit to yet since I haven’t done many of these, but given my experience with the three I tinkered around with, I’m going to say expect roughly six mini-essays throughout the course of the year. The more time I have for each one, the higher quality they’ll be. And I guarantee they’ll be more enjoyable to read than me rambling about some broken heuristic we’re using for hiring designers today.

In a strange way, I’m going back to the older style of writing longer content, the same kind that put me off from writing verbose blog posts and led me to creating this blog in the first place, but I’m being very intentional about it this time. It’s easy to write a lot of words and say nothing in particular, but it’s really, really difficult to write a succinct summary of something in as few words as possible while painting a vivid image in the reader’s mind the entire time. Some of my favorite mini-essays from The Anthropocene Reviewed are two pages long, and they’re so rich with detail and divulge so much information in so few sentences that I’ve been examining them over and over again to learn how those sentences and paragraphs are crafted. I’d like to get there one day, so here’s a start. Besides, writing about these random topics has helped me expand my horizons and learn about new things at a level of depth and detail that I otherwise wouldn’t be exposed to, so I’m loving that as well.

I’m still planning to do my “Best of” summaries at the end of the year, and you might still see the occasional post about something random if I feel really strongly about it. But if you see a blog post after a long pause with a strange title that seems really offbeat, I hope you’ll take the chance to sit down and read it with a freshly brewed cup of coffee. That type of writing soothes my soul, and I hope it provides some comfort to you as you read those posts as well. We’re all trying to exert some level of control and influence over the absolutely batshit world we find ourselves in today, and this is my little contribution towards that. Anyway, enjoy, and thanks for reading! And a special thanks to those who have clicked into my momentary musings over the past years about everything that I’ve written about, appreciate all of you!