An introduction to the blog, that is. If you need an introduction to me, this is the place to go.
The Short Version
Here’s the TL:DR on this: Social media is exhausting, newsletters feel intrusive outside of very specific stuff, and I missed having my own space. So … this is going to my primary online residence for the next little duration. A good old-fashioned blog. I’ll still be on Twitter a bunch, but more of it will redirect here than before.
The Long Version
I tried this before, actually. My friend Sahil set up a whole site for me which used those fancy new static pages (Jekyll, in our case), and he designed a lovely site with a portfolio section, a writing section, and even a very optimistic fonts section. It was extremely cool, and it got me a lot of work (which was its main function), and the handy contact form still got a lot of use once I’d stopped updating the site (this one has one of those too, worry not).
Except, soon afterwards, the portfolio stopped being a priority, given people knew my work enough that I had steady inquiries coming in, and the static blog meant that I had to wait around till a post was up before I could tweet about it, Github kept throwing issues that I didn’t understand, and finally, a couple of months ago, I decided that lettering was no longer going to be my focus, all of which meant that I needed to rethink this website, and I landed on … a WordPress blog.1
This way, whatever I post here gets automatically reposted to Twitter, and I don’t have to be on there all the time. But also, more and more, I’ve found that any thoughts that are slightly more important than what I had for lunch feel like they need that unity of context that a blog has, and not the fragmentation of Twitter. A Twitter thread, while it has its uses, is a soul-crushing way to express a long continuing series of thoughts on any subject.
I like my newsletter, and I have loved writing on it, but I have always felt that access to someone’s inbox needs to be used judiciously. A newsletter should occasional – weekly, twice a month, monthly, that sort of thing – and posting three times a week should be reserved for a place people choose to come to.
So I wanted to have a space where I could post something longer than a tweet but shorter than a newsletter – thoughts about books, movies, the first evening walk of the winter, et cetera. You know, and this seems to be the unavoidable term, a blog.
Some days I can’t believe that we had the apotheosis of the social internet – the blogosphere – and we threw it away for bloody Twitter. And I contributed! I genuinely thought at one point that my blog had become pointless. Now I feel envious of everyone who just soldiered on till the rest of us circled back. Well, here I am, tail suitably tucked between my metaphorical legs.
How We Mean to Proceed
The front page of this site will be this blog – that was the primary thing for this iteration. I’ll post lettering and writing updates as applicable. I do running threads about books and movies on Twitter – I’ll probably start posting my comments here, but continue running the links in those threads, because they’re honestly quite handy. I’ll keep posting short essays (blogposts, we used to call them) about just … stuff. I don’t want to do traditional linkblogging, but I like the idea of posting a single link with some thoughts about it, that sounds like fun. I’ll probably also repost anything from my old blog or my newsletter that I feel is worth keeping around – I’ll mark those as such.
I absolutely encourage comments on posts – I think one of my big mistakes in the last iteration was to have no way to get feedback about what I was posting – and I’d definitely rather hear from you here or by email than over Twitter.
Up top (under the banner image that clearly needs to be replaced), you can see links that will lead you to the few permanent pages of the website: a page about me, a list of my lettering credits, a list of my writing credits (fiction only), a contact form, and a link to sign up to my newsletter. I’ll probably add a lettering portfolio up there soon.
If you choose, you can follow this blog the old-fashioned way – through a feed reader. You’ll find links to those in the sidebar. Here’s a list of free online feed readers if you don’t know any.
Anyway, that’s the site. Hope you stick around!