20 Years of Blogging
This past Saturday, November 2, 2024, was my twentieth anniversary of blogging. Here’s what I remember: I was a sophomore in high school, fifteen years old. It was mid-term exams and I had a half-day. One of my favorite bands released a new album. It was also election day and George W. Bush would go on to win a second term. I had started to read a few blogs and for whatever reason, sitting at home alone that afternoon, I decided to start one.
That blog (thankfully) is no longer online — in 2009 I moved to Tumblr and then in 2019 started self-hosting here — but I’d archived the site and took a look at those early posts this weekend. They were embarrassingly myopic: quick posts about what I was doing, music I was listening to, photographs I was taking. But I was also struck by the sight of seeds for the work I’d later do, the interests I’d slowly develop, the career I’d go on to have.
Perhaps more than anything else, it was blogging — both writing them and reading them — that shaped my intellectual development as an adolescent moving into adulthood. When I started that blog, I didn’t think I was going to become a graphic designer. I wanted to be an architect then. But around this same time, I discovered Design Observer — and later SpeakUp and Subtraction — and was pulled into the world of graphic design. I realized, through these blogs, that this was what I was actually interested in. To a fifteen year old kid in suburban Pennsylvania, blogs connected me to this world — to many worlds — outside the one I knew. My impression of graphic design — and graphic designers — were people who made work and talked about, wrote about it. I wanted to be part of that world.
Last month, The Verge did a week of features on how 2004 shaped the world we live in now. It was only then that I realized how important this year was to my own development. It was the year I got Gmail, the year I got an mp3 player and started downloading music, the year I bought my first domain name, the year I got my first digital camera. So much of my life was shaped by the blogs, the ideas, the people, the technology from that year.
I don’t miss much about that era but I do miss the feeling of blogs. I miss the feeling of working it out in public, the exchange of ideas, the deep dives into one’s particular interests. There were no algorithms, no talk of engagement, no trying to build an audience (at least for me, I’m not sure many people read my early posts and I didn’t care). One thing I noticed looking back at my early posts this weekend was how often I wrote about blogging: about what I wanted to blog about, about ideas for other blogs. At the risk of doing that again here, reading those old blogs made me want to do that again. I’m not going to commit to posting more on this site. But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want to try to post more.
I had been online for a few years already in 2004: I’d been teaching myself rudimentary HTML but signing up for Blogger that afternoon changed my life. It’s silly to say but it’s true. I’ve realized that I came to graphic design through writing. My first love was not designing itself but writing about designing. Virgil Abloh used to say that everything he did was for hist seventeen year old self. I feel that too. The writing practice I’ve built over the last few years stems from my fifteen year old self, trying to recapture that excitement. But more than that, it’s for my fifteen year old self, trying to show him models for being in the world.