There are things I've spent quite a bit of time on that nobody's ever seen, and sometimes I reflect on that negatively. Things I poured myself into that seemingly came to nothing. But sometimes you just need a longer viewpoint. In the early 2000s, everyone said Microsoft had "won" their "battle" with Apple because of desktop market dominance. Now, 20 years later, we can see the context for computers expanding far beyond the desktop, and Apple positioning themselves to work up from an apparently simple device into eventual ubiquity. And also, that they both still exist, that they are both among the largest companies ever, and that maybe the battle was constructed for our attention more than anything.
In 2008, it was easy to feel the US had changed irrevocably for the better. A black Democrat president! Control of Congress! The iPhone! We were plunging headlong into the beautiful future. We didn't understand the impact of the 2008 housing collapse, or read the Democrats' response to this as presaging their near-complete ineffectiveness and disinterest in meaningfully improving most people's lives. We didn't understand that Republican efforts to undermine the integrity of our elections were just about to reach a tipping point, or that they would use the specters of race and financial equity to conjure even greater monsters than Bush. Some of us, me included, didn't understand the extent to which power protects power.
Anyway. I'm just reminding myself that things aren't necessarily the way they seem this year; or that they won't stay this way. That, at a personal level, there are hundreds of projects and thousands of ideas I've left scattered in my wake, panels and cones burning off on reentry, and it's really easy to look at any of them and simply regret. There are things I've poured hundreds of hours into that very few people have ever seen, for various reasons.
In 2013, I started listening to the Insert Credit Show podcast. In the years since, I've become friends with and done work for several people from the show. This is an obscured overview of one of several(!) huge documents I've filled in trying to redesign Insert Credit's site since... 2017(?), as a volunteer, exploratory project. Each of these blurry rectangles is a whole or partial site layout.
For the last couple of years, I regarded this as a failure. I've felt bad because it never launched. But that wasn't on me; it just wasn't time for them yet. Now it's time to finally make it, and I'm trying to arrange everything else so that I can make it happen in the next couple months. And I can look back and recognize the effort that went into these designs absolutely made me a better designer, and that there's a long way for me to go, yet.
This is just one of many things that I've held onto as failures for the last few years, which now one way or another are revealing some small blooms, if not full, edible fruit.
I've been through professional hell over the last couple years, and spent a lot of time looking into the unfocused distance fearing I was totally ruined. Maybe I still will be. Money is a fuck. But time is long, and I didn't die last year, and I'm not gonna fucking die this year if I can help it, and I'm going to do what I can to help the people, projects, and causes I believe in.
Here's an unrelated, good song: