The Week I Broke It Twice

Things bore me fast. Doesn’t matter how good they are—music, people, whatever—after a certain point I just can’t look at them anymore. That’s what happened with the old design here. It started feeling impersonal, so I decided it needed more soul, which in my head translated to: a layout that actually held the writing in a decent frame. I built the notebook design. Some people liked it. Someone thought it was an April Fool’s joke. I liked it for about four days and then I didn’t.

So on a stormy night I opened Photoshop and designed something new. Looked great in my head. Looked great on screen. I’m going to be honest—my blood alcohol level was probably doing a significant share of the aesthetic judgment. I published it anyway. You hated it.

That means I managed to wreck two designs in a single week, each one dragging the credibility of this journal down a notch. If I were running a railway I’d have already issued a resignation statement. Instead I’m doing the only sensible thing: traveling exactly one week back in time. The old design is live again. A few features are missing because I delete things without thinking first, but the structure is intact. Call it a brief rehabilitation stay—the journal’s back, steadier, less experimental. The one actual change going forward: more personal writing, in better proportion to the pop-culture noise. Less performance. More thinking out loud.