It's Nice That. Weekly Discussions

The Blog Blackout

This week we invited people through Twitter to submit an article for our weekly discussion, thankfully Manchester based designer Chris Gray took the opportunity and here it is. If you would like to get involved in the future email will@itsnicethat.com.

I probably spend an unhealthy amount of time on blogs, to the point where I waste hours looking at the same thing on about 200 different pages. Which did get me thinking about what I did before there was countless websites all doing the same thing yet are all equally popular. From working in a big studio environment and seeing the studio grind to a halt when the net dies to working for myself trying to be disciplined enough to not click safari every time I get a spare minute. There seems to be a total reliance on being able to surf the web as part of being a designer. Surely it can’t be a good thing that most of us are all getting the same inspiration from the same places. No wonder everyones work is starting to look the same. Every week I get e-mails from students that are carbon copies of a recent post and I wish I could reach through my monitor and give them a right old slap. Not to mention that every second advert on TV seems to be cack handed rip-off from something good found on a blog. I’m sure I’m not the only one who hasn’t forgotten the Berocca advert. So that’s me done. I’ve managed to convince myself that it would do me no harm from being offline. Well. At least until tomorrow.

So, where now, how do we stay aware without falling into the pitfalls of styles and trends?

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Chris Gray runs the art label Toy, designs under the name We Shall See and is represented by Studio AKA. His work has appeared in Vice, idN, Computer Arts and books published by Victionary and Gestalten. He is also a writer for the Design Assembly. www.thisistoy.com

It fees a little stupid to do a copy and paste of the whole post, but when I started this blog the aim was to share things that I find interesting and by sharing, I mean if you like it, go find out a little more about it, comment discuss, I have put a link to it...  but I often wonder not only how many of you actually find more about it, also, how many clicks does one have to go through to find the original source to it.. a blogging nightmare it can become. Which is also one of the things they have discuss about. So I post it complete this time so you don't have to click again... you still have to be bother to read though. Will you? .. well, if you did, you might then also be bother to click to 'It's nice that' cos  there is a very big chance you will find their weekly discussion relevant. they also think must comments suck, and they question what is the role of the blogger and the blog reader... self publishing is gonna kill the old hard copies.. is that a good or a bad thing? anyway, why are you reading this half digested article of something i read somewhere else? go read it your self .... 

click click click

and then we'll never see the sun light again

:)