Going at it again

7 January 2020

Two years after the first « note », this journal is still inactive. Not because of a lack of ideas, but because it takes time, and I haven’t fully committed to put that time aside. It is high time it changes.
How can I reduce the time and « friction »? A few leads:

Simplify the site. If publishing every note requires time and thinking –apart from the writing itself– solely to manage visual or technical aspects, I will be even less inclined to do it often. So farewell « art-directed blog posts » and other graphical feats. A single layout should be sufficient for all the notes.

Write in a single language? I love French, I wanted to promote my beautiful language, and I decided long ago that this site would be bilingual. But the fact it requires twice as much work for every publication is undeniably a major factor of my inactivity.
My audience is two-folds: on one hand my clients, a majority of them French ; on the other hand designers and web developers who might be interested in my tweets and notes. These two audiences don’t necessarily overlap.
For now I will keep writing in both languages, then statistics will tell me if it is worth the effort: if my notes are predominately read in English, I will consider writing them in English only. The rest of the site, my portfolio and company information, would remain bilingual.

Progress in baby steps. A simple or even simplistic layout is always worth more than a hypothetical perfect design that never ships. Redesigning in the open seems to be a strong trend these days, so I will ride that wave and reduce the design of this site to its most barebones core, and comment here about my choices and decisions as I go.

The art of not writing a lead 20 years of web design