One Blog with Actual Conviction

Second-rate blogs multiply like something nobody planted. You find them in the feed and you recognize them immediately: the design that gestures at personality without having any, the posts that are three weeks behind whatever they’re pretending to have discovered first, the ambient sense of a person who wants to have a blog more than they want to say anything. You leave within thirty seconds. You leave before you’ve even properly arrived.

Paul’s blog—Design Is Nowhere—is the opposite of that. He writes about art, music, and visual culture with the specificity of someone who actually lives inside these things rather than reporting on them from a safe algorithmic distance. He posts faster than outlets with five times the resources, which is either a testament to genuine enthusiasm or an indictment of everyone else. Probably both.

What I value in a blog isn’t comprehensiveness. It’s point of view—the sense that someone here has thought about why this particular thing is interesting, not just that it is. Paul has that. His taste and mine don’t always overlap, which is fine, which is actually better than fine.

I’ve been following it since it launched and it keeps earning the follow. That’s rarer than it sounds. In a landscape where most blogs are either dead, corporate, or just worse versions of other blogs, something this alive and particular deserves to be noticed.

If you care about design, music, or wherever those two worlds rub against each other, follow it. Some blogs become habits out of inertia. This one should be one for better reasons than that.