Genesis - Attempt 2

1 May 2023

3 min read

My last post tentatively labeled June as redesign publication month. However, it’s May, and the site looks a lot better. 🍾🍾

I have a post in the works about the types of perfectionism that exist, the cult of neurotic perfectionism, and my own battle against it while first designing this site. It’s a doozy and I’m excited for you to read it. Not to spoil the ending, but my general workflow has improved a lot since first designing this site 18 months ago. You can see the dissonance between what I thought I was capable of (shipping in June) and what actually happened (shipping a month early).

I had to take a few steps back to rethink the way this site should be structured, so I decided to write out these thoughts as a pseudo-manifesto.

This blog exists for two primary reasons.

Digital ownership

This blog ultimately exists because I am pretty stubborn. I prefer keeping my digital content under my own control. I’m my own little Ingsoc: I can edit and amend these posts however I please (I promise I’ll use this power for good).

Interactivity

If the vibrant state of learning platforms has said anything about interactivity-as-a-learning-tool, it is that it works well. When we can fiddle with sliders and relate this to how complex systems work, we learn quickly. Likewise, interactive content helps to immerse us. Instead of a wall of text, there’s a graphic that not only allows us to refresh our eyes, but digest the content we just read.

These two reasons both have a bit of an underlying theme to them: my general distrust of social media. A few months earlier, I might have only used this site as a project repository. I would have used some particular short-form text-based social media platform (you know the one) to share my blog posts. However, the increasingly instability, lack of cohesive creator tools, and general bad vibes made me revise that plan pretty quickly.

Well, it’s a short manifesto, but etching down my thoughts helps me make sense of them. It was one hell of a marathon for something so simple in the end, but I’ve finished it, and I’m ready to sit back and actually work alongside a design I’m happy with. I can’t promise a schedule to these posts, but they will generally be technologically relevant in some way.

Either way, you’re here reading this, and I appreciate you for that. 🤙