Visualgui.com Turns 23

My blog, Visualgui.com, turns 23 today. While the blogging sphere has diminished after the rise of social media, I am still blogging almost daily. It’s one of my favorite activities that I still enjoy doing. I am so glad that I have found blogging. It has opened a whole new world for me that I didn’t know existed.

Up until I started blogging, I hated writing. I didn’t know what to write. I stared at a blank piece of paper or a blinking cursor on screen and couldn’t get my words out of my head. I dreaded writing academic papers. I almost failed all my writing classes. I ended up choosing design as a major so I didn’t have to write. I just needed to make things look pretty. I loved design until I had to make a living off it. Design has become a job. I didn’t like design for money. I enjoyed designing for myself.

In contrast, writing will never become my profession. I will never make money off writing. I don’t need to write for others. I only write for myself. Blogging allows me to write whatever the fuck I want. I spent the last 23 years practicing my writing in both English and Vietnamese. I no longer fear the blank page nor the blinking cursor. It feels liberating that I can get my thoughts out of my head.

Blogging has given me the space I needed to work out my issues, document my life, and just write. Furthermore, blogging has made me a reader and a listener. For many years I hated reading. After I started blogging, I read voraciously so I could practice writing reviews. The more I read, the more I enjoyed reading and discovering new topics. I read from fiction to non-fiction, design to web development, typography to technology, jazz to hip-hop, and English to Vietnamese. I won’t stop reading.

I have always been a music listener. Whenever I discovered something interesting in music, I wanted to share with others. I wanted to point out exactly what I was hearing. I didn’t have too many people around me to share my listening experience. As a result, I wanted to write about music and share with the world. When I first started to review music, it took me forever to get the words out. My music vocabulary was limited. The more I write, however, the more words I pick up and my flow becomes better. I still enjoy listening and writing about music.

Whenever I get into something, I tend to stay with it for as long as I still make progress. I love skiing and snowboarding because I will continue to improve myself. Writing has become a life-long learning process because I can continue to improve. I don’t need to become a writer. I don’t need to become a professional skier or snowboarder. I am still a professional designer who does many other things. Even though blogging, reading, skiing, snowboarding may have nothing to do with design, they help me to become a better designer. I gain broader perspectives and I bring outside influences into design. I don’t get locked into design trends. I don’t get creative blocks. I don’t get burned out. Now I understand the reason to look outside of design.

My blog has been running on WordPress for over 20 years. The first few years, it was powered by B2, which was the core infrastructure before WordPress. Over the years, WordPress has moved beyond a blogging engine and become a full-blown content management system. Nevertheless, I still only use WordPress for blogging. I keep my theme simple so that I can change the design at least once a year. I mostly changed the typography and moved things around a bit to improve the reading experience.

Twenty three years into blogging and I still want to write something each day; therefore, I will continue to do this for as long as I can. It has been an incredible journey so far and there’s no reason for me to stop. I am still living. I still have many things to get off my chest. I am still blogging.

If you would like to see the visual changes of my blog in the past 23 years, check out the archived screenshots.