Inaugural banter and an explanation of what is going on here
Here we go again.
Even my mom knows I’ve had more blogs than birthdays by now. First there was the Zooiblog, a once-popular venue where I could write about fancy CSS ideas and people would actually use them. Jina Bolton used the drop shadows on a previous design and it sent people my way for years after. At its apex, the blog received about 2,000 unique visits per day, something I haven’t been able to rake up anywhere since. I made friends thanks to that little blog there, real friends, friends I still see, friends who went on to do great stuff, too. It got me my first design clients. And I let it die. I probably let it die on purpose. I lost interest in writing about CSS tricks, web standards and whatever it was that actually pulled people in there. I wrote for myself for a short while and closed it officially a year ago.
Tumblr grabbed my attention for a while, and I still maintain “Rob’s Brain” there. It’s degraded into a test bed for silly ideas, a dump for funny nonsense from the web and links to things I like. It’s hardly a real blog, and I don’t put my heart in it. I noticed that, and decided to start something which required a lot of heart and even more discipline.
rbmntjs was the result. It’s my photo blog, updated Mondays and Fridays, and I’m very proud to say I’ve consistently updated it for over one hundred and fifty photos now. I don’t plan on ceasing its operation: it’s been a very solid push to keep me shooting photos at least once a week. There have been many highlights.
So why this new blog on this new domain with this new site? I like to focus. I can’t write about type design on a photo blog, and writing in-depth about visual metaphors just feels awkward on Tumblr. And I absolutely won’t Twitter about it.
What’s going to happen over here?
As the front page states, I mainly work on type, typography and user interaction. Every now and then something sparks me to talk about it, and I haven’t had the proper podium for it. This is that podium from now on. My own work, my methods, my inspirations and other things that I feel are entirely relevant to what I do. A proper blog once more, you could say.