Restarting a notebook

The site has been quiet for a long time.

Some of the older posts on this domain are still up, partly out of fondness, partly out of laziness. People kept linking to a few of them, which I appreciated, and the contact form kept generating the occasional polite email. But the writing had stopped, and the work had moved on, and the gap between what the site claimed to be and what the studio is actually doing had become embarrassing.

So this is the rewrite.

I want to write here again, but as a notebook rather than a shop window. Notes on brand systems and web craft. Slow opinions about typefaces. Occasional pieces of work, with the longer thinking that went into them. No newsletter signup pop-up, no resources section, no lead magnets. An archive that grows when there is something worth saying.

Frank Chimero’s site and Robin Rendle’s notes are both useful models for the kind of pace I am after. Robin describes his site as a shifting house next to a river of knowledge, and that is more or less the model. A house, kept tidy. A river, watched. Maggie Appleton’s digital garden is a third model for what a site like this can become if it is allowed to.

The first proper piece will follow next month. There is a draft about brand systems and the trouble with too many materials, which has been sitting in my head for over a year and has not yet been written down properly. (Now posted here, if you want to skip ahead.)