My first blog was a Tumblr, A Bit Late, which I started in June 2009. I picked Tumblr because the New York Times told me it had the nicest templates, and I proceeded to go about using it all wrong. It was weeks before a friend suggested I include photos on my posts. I wrote at length. I never used tags. I completely failed to comprehend what Tumblr was good for. As I’ve said before, I’m a Late Adopter.
But midway through last year, when I started blogging for Design Observer, I had a Tumblr epiphany. I began following more of what people call “single-serving Tumblrs”: 1950s ephemera (heavy on glamor), Scandinavian home design, brutalism, architecture everything. What was I supposed to be doing on Tumblr? Admiring the images, and reacting. I was supposed to like every Paul Rudolph and Kevin Roche building that filtered across my dashboard. I was supposed to reblog Jane Austen board games, Almanzo Wilder’s homestead application, Mies’s Resor House drawing. Below each image I just said what I felt, in two sentences or less. It was the equivalent of Twitter criticism. My Tumblr is far from single-serving, but it has now become a visual map of my interests, notes on my enthusiasms, in a less self-conscious (and less articulate) way than this blog. There’s something so pleasant about seeing wonderful things, new things and old things, with so little effort.
Latest Tweet
“You see all the tech folks now — they’ve released their addictive app, and now they’re all down in Esalen having t… https://t.co/K02xorEb0W
41 minutes ago
Latest Instagram
Featured articles
99 Percent Invisible
Curbed
New York Times
New Yorker