“It’s 2025. Who even blogs any more?”, the writing is already on the wall. Yet, I believe there has never been a better time to start a blog or at least a personal website. Especially for creatives and artists.
I’ll save the pros and (mostly) cons of social media for artists for another post. Let me dwell on the reasons for starting my own illustration blog for a few minutes, if only to quell my own self-doubts.
The nerdy reason
In addition to being an illustrator, I’m a web designer and developer and overall web geek, with my first website dating back to 1998. I don’t need an excuse to build a new personal website and blog from scratch, fully exploring all possibilities and spending weeks on end poring over small bits of code and design.
Ownership
Nerdy reason out of the way, there is one other reason I am starting this illustration blog. Ownership and control of my content. I have a newsletter on Substack, which will mostly mirror this blog, but before I dive into the newsletter business, I have this fear that as much as I like Substack, it is still owned by someone else. It is much better than more algorithmic platforms like Instagram, but there is no guarantee that it will stay the same. If someday Substack decides to use user data to train AI models for example (and I hope that day never comes), I will want to get out of there. What happens to all my content then?
Enter this blog. It is my website, my server, my back-end and front-end code and my content. I will always have this with me, even if Substack or any other content sharing platform goes away in the future. Even if, for some reason, I decide to take the website offline, I will still have the code and the content with me. I can make it a private website for only my audience, I can charge for it, I can give it away for free, I can publish it as a book, I can feed it to hungry goats or set a hundred monkeys with typewriters free on it. It is mine, I can do what I want with it.
Blogs are dead, long live the blog
So, here’s a word of encouragement to myself to keep this going. I’ve had several failed attempts at blogging before, but always ended up taking it down. This time it feels real. It feels like I need a place of my own and instead of making it a blog about my life, like I did before, it is about my work, which, I hope, will stand the test of time.