On taking the new year quietly

The first two weeks of January are the loudest and least useful weeks of the design year. The industry collectively wakes up, opens its laptop, and immediately produces a year’s worth of “predictions” content, “trends” content, and “what we learned” content. A small number of these are worth reading. Most are written because traffic peaks at this time, and editors know that traffic peaks at this time, and writers are paid by traffic.

This year I am not writing any of those. Last year I wrote one. It was the worst piece of writing I produced all year. I do not know why I expected anything else.

The most useful posture I can find for the start of a year is to simply keep working on what I was working on in December. There are open projects. There is unfinished thinking. There are emails I have been putting off and contracts that need re-reading. None of this is improved by a January reset. The reset is an industry ritual, not a personal one, and I am taking the year off from it.

A small recommendation, if you are looking for January reading that is not breathless. The Pudding’s year-end work is consistently better than anyone else’s. Frank Chimero usually publishes a quiet year-in-review around now. Robin Sloan’s newsletter is reliably good and never lectures. None of these are predicting what 2025 will hold. They are looking sideways instead, which is more or less always more interesting.

The first proper post of 2025 will be later this month, on container queries, which I have been using in production for long enough to have actually formed an opinion.