We Made This blog – 20 years
It’s cake time!
This month marks the 20 year anniversary of the We Made This blog, which I began writing on 6 March 2006.
The blog originally lived on the Typepad blogging platform (which existed from 2003 to 2025) at wemadethis.typepad.com. Then in June 2010 I migrated it across to my new website, wemadethis.co.uk/blog, where it’s lived ever since.
The first seven months of posts got lost somewhere in the move, but can be seen thanks to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. The first instance of the blog captured on there is from 6 May 2006, and reveals my first nervous little blog post.
Having a look back at those carefree days, when we were all younger and more beautiful, here’s some the stuff that I was yammering on about in my early posts: the Sultan’s Elephant had just visited London; the second set of Penguin’s Great Ideas had just been nominated for a D&AD award; We Made This was featured in MacUser magazine (which was published until 2015); the Ephemera Society was having a fair, I published a passport of a trip to Hong Kong, New Zealand and Tokyo; and Gorillaz videos were being projected onto the concrete walls of the National Theatre.
Twenty years later, the next Ephemera Society Summer Fair is on 31 May this year, and Gorillaz have a rather good new album out. As Chrissie Hynde sang, some things change, some stay the same.
Having had a long browse through my old blog posts, it’s noticeable that they were generally much shorter than the stuff I write now, and way more frequent. I guess that’s mainly because I started using Twitter / X from around 2010, and stuff that would have been a blog post became a tweet – Twitter was so much more immediate, and easy to have conversations on. For a while it was a wonderful community of like-minded folk. But it became a cesspool of far-right propaganda once Elon Musk got his hands on it. Instagram was fun for a while too, but the advent of TikTok meant it morphed into a video-content site, so that using it now feels dirty – like wading through a boxset of rejected You’ve Been Framed clips while being force-fed advertising. That’s the enshittification of the internet for you.
Nowadays I use Bluesky for what I would have used Twitter for, and occasionally Instagram, but mainly I follow the POSSE model that Luis Mendo advocates: Publish on your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere.
Back in 2021, on the 15th birthday of the blog, I did a little run down of the most popular posts on the site: 15 Years of Blogging. There’s some pretty good stuff there.
Following up on that, I think I’d add these more recent posts:
Everything you wanted to know about QR codes but were afraid to ask
Graphic Design History Resources
In the early days of blogging, folks generally linked out to other blogs they liked – on a list that was called a blogroll. So here’s a huge hearty hug to a few friends from over the years who are still (mostly) posting:
BrandNew
Design Observer
Daniel Benneworth-Gray (newsletter)
Johnson Banks Thoughts
Justin’s Amazing World at Fenner Paper
Kottke
Noisy Decent Graphics (now archived)
Spitalfields Life
SwissMiss
The Casual Optimist
It’s been a wonderful twenty years. Thanks for stopping by.
Here’s some cake.
