For about a year now, I’ve been wanting to get some momentum behind a public-facing journal (aka a blog) which would showcase my work, my own cabinet of curiosities, and where my attention’s been each day, and form a searchable, ready-to-use index of my own content and thoughts. 

But—I gotta be honest with myself—I’ve been wanting to do this for more than just a year. Throughout college I berated myself for not jumping on making a beautiful portfolio, a website I can call my own, and a blog I call home. Instead, my thoughts got bottled up in thick little journals that I kept to myself and revealed to my college community only once I was about to graduate in a mini design exhibition. Before that, I recorded my daily and weekly inspirations and experiences, but I did not consistently display them anywhere.

And then even my journaling habit died off. Once the world declared itself “Post-Covid,” my notebooks found less and less use, serving more like a ship’s logbook than a record of my feelings and worries and joys and rare outings with my friends during Covid. And then, by the end of 2021, I nearly stopped journaling altogether.

I knew that the next evolution in my journaling habit would arrive eventually. I wanted to pivot from journaling for my own personal benefit alone to journaling publicly. (I swear I first found the phrase “public-facing journal” all the way in the back end of a Superbrothers blog when I was obsessed with Sword & Sworcery as a young teenager and literally did nothing all day but scour my favorite game developers websites for hidden secrets and clues to upcoming games. Looking at the Superbrothers HQ right now, I still love the bare-bones HTML white-space look and unpretentious jargon [like I/O Cinema, whatever that means]. Just found this little page, which reads like a cute note to a future website designer. Personally, I hope they never update the look of the site.)

A hurdle loomed: I could not get over what the first post on my new public-facing journal—I’m trying to avoid saying the word blog whenever I can, apparently—would be. Should I start with a manifesto of sorts, proclaiming why I am opening up this space? Would I just start with no fanfare at all, jumping into a subject I enjoy, as if this site was already in the middle of a years-long conversation? Whatever it was going to be, it stood in my path like a temple sphinx, and I suck at riddles. (Which is why I prefer to DM than play—I can ask the riddles without needing to answer them myself.) 

I guess I answered my own question by choosing the former option: a manifesto just felt right. There is no one demanding an explanation to my sudden intrusion on my tiny corner of the internet. No press release awaits this entry with bated breath. But I had to jump this gap somehow, and explaining to both myself and you why I am here and what this is and what I hope it will become gives me assurance that it won’t disappear. 

Back when I ran a little site called theoutfox.com (it just links back here now), I tried the second option: skip an introduction and just write. I talked about music (I think it was the first Big Red Machine album?) as if I was already an experienced blogger with hundreds of posts behind me. (The writing itself did not convey that). And while the lack of fanfare did make the first post less scary, the site did not remain a well-kept area. The posts were too few and far-between and felt forced, like all the WordPress blogs that up and died by mid-2010’s. 

But it helped to put on a writing hat and act like I knew what I was doing. (Cue Austin Kleon’s chapter on exactly that in Steal Like an Artist. “All the world’s a stage….”) And, at the same time, it helps to be dead honest about how much of an amateur I am.

So I wear both hats at once: one, a hat of an expert, tricking myself into doing things—like starting up this digital journal—I’d otherwise be too scared to; and two, the hat of the beginner, who asks earnest questions and pushes hard for the answer.

Cory Doctorow writes of his painstaking method to publish his newsletter: “Writing every day makes it easier to write every day.” I believe it. 

For myself, I’d be content with a hat-trick of three posts each week—a daily/weekly dispatch, to now quote Austin Kleon’s Show Your Work. I’d watch this place grow into the index I need, full of written materials for design ideas, for memories, for opinions that will feel dated, I’m sure, in just a few years.

To complete this pseudo-manifesto, I here explicitly declare the reasons for my internet-logbook's existence.

The 23 y.o. Design Graduate's Blog Manifesto

1. As stated at the start, I have dropped my daily journaling habit, and I wish to pick it up again. The incentive of item #2 below, combined with the natural satisfaction of improving my writing, discovering what I think, and finding a healthy space to share my inspirations with an online community and hopefully discover more in the process, will keep me engaged more than a lonely Zequenz notebook will. (Or so my theory goes).
2. As hinted at earlier, I want a daily dispatch to show off my work. I will count this place as my studio, my workspace, my cabinet of curiosities, and my gallery. 
3. And finally, this sparkling-new, public-facing journal is born because it needs to. I follow designers, writers, artists, and other beautiful people that inspire me daily. Yet not one of them is close to my age. I’m writing these posts because I wish I could have found a blog by a recent design graduate, age 23, archiving their journey out of college into the design field.

Or, you could sum that all up with this single-item list:

1. Because I wanted to.

Fair enough. Onwards!

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P.S. Would I get sued to oblivion by Tolkien's lawyers if I named this blog the Spilmarillion?