2021 Redesign or: How I Learned to Stop Art Directing and Love the Blog

Art-directed blog posts are a trap. For instance, I have a silly little post about hair band albums that I've been nudging for months. I couldn't get it to look how I wanted, and I ended up scrapping the idea. Mind you, the post took about an hour to write. I could have pushed send at that point and gone on to the next post. I asked myself: how many more posts could I have written instead of trying ten different shades of 80s-inspired pink?

I realized that if I cared about publishing in any consistent manner, I'd have to give up the obsessive art-directed posts (which is hard to do when it's a creative outlet). So I decided to keep some flexibility to art direct; I'd just put up some constraints. Dave Rupert has a great (and practical) article about art-directed posts that made a lot of sense to me. Instead of giving myself total freedom, I've limited the number of decisions I can make. I can change the font, and I can change the color scheme.

Like Regan, I feel the tension of art directed posts being an impediment to publishing.

My goal (right now) is to write and publish, so I do it over and over. This helps me become better at writing and by extension thinking.

My goal (right now) is not to get better at making things look awesome. If that were my goal, I’d likely take on art directed posts again.

But there’s always that question: are people coming to your blog to read it or to look at it?