After a bit of discussion, I have decided to start loading copies of all my desktop magazine articles to the BittenByDesign website. All the articles from here [insert link to author list of articles] are going to be added to my site after the traffic to the desktop articles starts to wane.
Each will be logged with a ‘Originally posted on desktop’ or ‘As seen in desktop magazine’. It is really a way of keeping a copy of my work in a format that I can access regardless of what may happen in future.
Now most of the people who know me well would be surprised to find out that I am writing for a design publication. I was never the talker nor the writer, I was the guy in the back of the class illustrating comics and sketching through all my classes, regardless of the actual topic of the class. For me, maths, english and art were all the same. I drew in all of them! Even after several years of the moving from one rental to the next I have lost quite a bit of my illustration, but I am kicking myself I didn’t take the time to scan and save it all. There is even quite a bit of work I did for the CIT and University newspapers, none of the articles and reviews I wrote up are available to me. Mostly due to two failed hard drives losing most of my stored work from the last fifteen years.
If I had added the scans of illustrations and copies of the articles to a blog, I would still be able to access them. It sort of pays to keep a blog around for maintaining backups of all your work in a format that you can use to recreate things like a portfolio after a house fire. Remote backups are a massive help, and if cloud server backup was faster I would certainly be looking at using that as an option.
It also won’t hurt to have more examples of my writing all in the one spot. That way anyone who comes to the site has the option to see all my other design work. Building up my opinion pieces and articles, crafting them better and producing higher quality content will show through the ages of the work. My communication skills are improving, but I am the very laid back surfer type who lets everything wash past without stressing me out. More often than not my oldest friends will talk of a time when I didn’t really speak at all, not that I couldn’t, I just didn’t have anything to say. A friend of mine once commented that she didn’t hear me speak for the first two years she knew me.
It was somewhat a case of right place right time in regards to my writing, I had begun blogging and had started working on an ebook on my experiences in design, which lead me to writing quite a bit of short opinion pieces and product reviews for a website that did lots of cool stuff to buy or shop for. That in turn led me to writing a few pieces for various design magazine sites, and finally leading me to desktop which at the time I was already actively participating with, via the comments on articles and in response to a couple of twitter call outs for comments on various design articles for inclusion in the magazine.
The book is still being crafted due to my writing skills improving I am going back and rewriting chapters to better suit the tone of the writing in the newer chapters. It also seems like I find another topic to write about every other week so the book went from ten chapters to thirteen to sixteen and more! I will cull them down, but if there is too much in the book, I may just split them into the core of the book and release the associated extra chapters through my website.
And before you ask, yes, the articles are mine. They are not scraped by some content robot like some other design article sites are doing. Each of the articles will be marked as coming from desktop magazine with links back to the original and they will have an ‘As seen in desktop magazine’ graphic so there isn’t any confusion as to the source of the original appearance of the article.
Redbubble Rocks!
