2025-05-09 19:00:00
This is the 89th edition of People and Blogs, the series where I ask interesting people to talk about themselves and their blogs. Today we have Anh and her blog, anhvn.com
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I'm Anh, a designer and artist based in Canada. My hobbies include, predictably: making and looking at websites, drawing, playing video games, and collecting all of the above on my website.
By day—and also by night, because I maintain chaotic working hours—I design web things at a nice company.
I've been Online™ for a long time, and I suppose I've always been "blogging" in some way for years—I'm much more comfortable with writing than speaking, and I'm a weird shy nerd, so I've always drifted towards oversharing on the internet.
anhvn.com started back in 2020 when I decided I would stop using a pseudonym and actually post stuff under my name that people would see. Before that, I had a blog that maybe three friends of mine knew about and looked at, which was freeing but also very lonely. I used to share more personal things then too, like what I did day-to-day or things I was struggling with, but now I'm more private about that. I appreciate vulnerability, but I'm more wary these days for privacy's sake.
anhvn.com is also more than just a blog—as a personal website, it's where I put other interests: unfinished notes and references ("the digital garden"); artwork I post on social media ("the sketchbook"); tracking the media I consume, like movies and books ("the media diary"). I like the freedom of being able to put whatever I want on it and designing how it's showcased.
“anhvn” stands for, of course, “anh visual novel.” (JK, this is just one of my former homepages.) I've used a lot of different names online over the years, and I've also grown out of a lot of them. I based this domain on my actual name because I know I won't be tired of it in a decade or two.
I write "weeknotes" consistently, though not at an actual weekly cadence. To write them, I'm usually pulling from some archive rather than trying to remember what I did—I'll look at my watchlist to see what I last watched; I'll go through my bookmarks app to see what cool links I've saved; I'll scroll through my own social media to see what I've posted about. This all gets dumped into a Markdown document in VS Code, and I keep adding to it and writing until I think I've covered everything or I grow sick of it.
When I'm tired of my usual blogging ways, I'll switch up the format. I've recently started doing chat-style posts—i.e. posts that are formatted like text messages—which are more casual and freeing to write. Once in a while, I'll design a new blog post layout just for a single post, because I'm bored of my current site design and want to play with some different fonts or colours. Sometimes this starts in Figma, and sometimes I do it directly in the browser.
I never have anyone review my posts before I publish, but I'd probably introduce that step in the future if I ever write anything more ambitious—all of my blog posts are quite informal. I do the most minimal of proofreading myself.
It depends on the creative activity. For computer stuff, I work best when I'm at home—I need the ergonomics of a full desk setup, otherwise I feel slowed down. When writing, I need to be alone (also, preferably, on my regular computer setup), otherwise I can't focus. In my ideal world, I'm designing and writing in the morning while drinking my first coffee of the day.
I like drawing just about anywhere though. Unlike designing or writing, which involve a lot of paring down nebulous ideas into something presentable, drawing feels more expansive and benefits from external stimuli.
My site is built with Eleventy, a static site generator. It's perfect for me: relatively straight-forward to set up, flexible in how to structure my content, and has a large community. I have a lot of custom pages on my site because it's so easy to set up a new one. And of course, I've written a post about this.
I host all my code on GitHub, and deploy it through Netlify. My domain is registered on Namecheap. It works fine! I don't really know how it all works under the hood—I don't know what npm is, and it's fine—but setting it up was straight-forward enough, and it hasn't broken on me yet, which is a great relief.
I would perhaps take tagging/categorizing more seriously—my blog archive has now grown to a point where it's unwieldy to peruse, and I'll need to go back and tag things for when I add post filtering. Otherwise, I'm quite satisfied with where it's at.
My domain costs $15.88/year (a steal, really, for a five-letter .com domain of my own incredibly common name). That's the only website cost; I don't pay anything for GitHub or Netlify, and my company pays for my Adobe account, which allows me to use their webfonts.
My website generates zero revenue, which I'm perfectly fine with. If I find myself in a situation where I need to generate income though, I'm sure that would change. I've entertained thoughts of monetising in some way for years—such as through selling digital goods, taking art commissions, or having a ko-fi donations account—but I don't need to right now and that's not a burden I want to take on without good reason. I enjoy having the freedom to do whatever I want online; if I turn it into a business, then that comes with its own set of responsibilities and expectations.
That door isn't closed, though. At the end of the day, we all need to pay rent, so I'm all for blog monetisation.
Floating around in the back of my mind, always, are comics—two very cool things you should check out are the Comics Devices Library and Standards, Semantics, & Sequential Art. And then I humbly offer you my budding thoughts on webcomics, from my digital garden.
This was the 89th edition of People and Blogs. Hope you enjoyed this interview with Anh. Make sure to follow her blog (RSS) and get in touch with her if you have any questions.
You can support this series on Ko-Fi and all supporters will be listed here as well as on the official site of the newsletter.
Jamie Thingelstad (RSS) — Piet Terheyden — Eleonora — Carl Barenbrug (RSS) — Steve Ledlow (RSS) — Paolo Ruggeri (RSS) — Nicolas Magand (RSS) — Rob Hope — Chris Hannah (RSS) — Pedro Corá (RSS) — Sixian Lim (RSS) — Matt Stein (RSS) — Winnie Lim (RSS) — Flamed (RSS) — C Jackdaw (RSS) — Fabricio Teixeira (RSS) — Rosalind Croad — Mike Walsh (RSS) — Markus Heurung (RSS) — Michael Warren (RSS) — Chuck Grimmett (RSS) — Robin Harford (RSS) — Bryan Maniotakis (RSS) — Barry Hess (RSS) — Ivan Moreale — Ben Werdmuller (RSS) — Cory Gibbons — Luke Harris (RSS) — Lars-Christian Simonsen (RSS) — Cody Schultz — Brad Barrish (RSS) — Nikita Galaiko — Erik Blankvoort — Jaga Santagostino — Andrew Zuckerman — Mattia Compagnucci (RSS) — Thord D. Hedengren (RSS) — Fabien Sauser (RSS) — Maxwell Omdal — Jarrod Blundy (RSS) — Andrea Contino (RSS) — Sebastian De Deyne (RSS) — Nicola Losito (RSS) — Lou Plummer (RSS) — Leon Mika (RSS) — Veronique (RSS) — Neil Gorman (RSS) — Reaper (RSS) — Matt Rutherford (RSS) — Aleem Ali (RSS) — Nikkin (RSS) — Hans (RSS) — Matt Katz (RSS) — Ilja Panić — Emmanuel Odongo — Peter Rukavina (RSS) — James (RSS) — Adam Keys (RSS) — Alexey Staroselets (RSS) — John L — Minsuk Kang (RSS) — Naz Hamid (RSS) — Ken Zinser (RSS) — Jan — Grey Vugrin (RSS) — Luigi Mozzillo (RSS) — Alex Hyett (RSS) — Andy Piper — Hrvoje Šimić (RSS) — Travis Schmeisser — Doug Jones — Vincent Ritter (RSS) — Shen — Fabian Holzer (RSS) — Courtney (RSS) — Dan Ritz (RSS) — İsmail Şevik (RSS) — Jeremy Bassetti (RSS) — Luke Dorny — Thomas Erickson — Herman Martinus (RSS) — Benny (RSS) — Annie Mueller (RSS) — SekhmetDesign — Gui (RSS) — Jamie (RSS) — Juha Liikala (RSS) — Ray (RSS) — Chad Moore (RSS) — Benjamin Wittorf (RSS) — Prabash Livera — BinaryDigit (RSS) — Radek Kozieł (RSS) — Marcus Richardson — Emily Moran Barwick (RSS) — Zach Barocas (RSS) — Gosha (RSS) — Ruben Arakelyan (RSS) — Manton Reece (RSS) — Silvano Stralla (RSS) — Mario Figueroa — Benjamin Chait (RSS) — Cai Wingfield — Pete (RSS) — Pete Millspaugh (RSS) — Martin Matanovic (RSS) — Coinciding Narratives (RSS) — Arun Venkatesan (RSS) — fourohfour.net (RSS)
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2025-05-06 22:00:00
Seeing and listening to the wind blowing though the fields, creating “waves”, is easily one of my favorite things to experience. It’s always so peaceful and relaxing.
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2025-05-05 23:00:00
One thing I started doing over the past few weeks, in an attempt to take better care of my mental health, is using Apple Health, specifically the State of Mind part of the app. I get pinged by my phone a few times a day to log how I feel at that very moment and before bedtime I’m asked to reflect how I felt throughout the day. I find that exercise very useful but also incredibly hard.
The reason why I find it so hard is because I don’t have reference points: on a scale from very unpleasant to very pleasant, how do I feel right now? I don’t really know? I’m not sure? I mean, if I slide it all the way to very pleasant, does that mean I’m feeling as happy and fulfilled as possible? Or it’s relative to some other metric? Same in the other direction. Could I feel worse? Yeah I could. And so most of the time I find myself dancing around the middle of the scale, sometimes logging a “neutral”, sometimes a “slightly unpleasant”, other times a “slightly pleasant”.
Reflecting on this made me realize that I don’t really know what my baseline is when it comes to mental well-being. I’m so used to feeling the way I do that it’s hard for me to figure out if I’m in a good spot or not with my mental state. Minds are tricky.
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2025-05-05 00:25:00
Sometimes you end up walking in odd places and you get to take photos from weird angles. Never thought I was going to take a picture of the highway from below while walking in between the lanes and yet here we are.
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2025-05-03 22:05:00
Probably too many people are sharing too many opinions on this subject so I’m not going to waste too much time adding my voice to this conversation.
That said, one thing I’m finding interesting is that I see people falling into two main camps for the most part. On one side are those who value output and outcome, and how to get there doesn’t seem to matter a lot to them. And on the other are the people who value the process over the result, those who care more about how you get to something and what you learn along the way.
It’s gonna be interesting to see if the two camps will find a way to coexist or if one is going to overwhelm the other.
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2025-05-02 19:00:00
This is the 88th edition of People and Blogs, the series where I ask interesting people to talk about themselves and their blogs. Today we have Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino and her blog, designswarm.com
To follow this series subscribe to the newsletter. A new interview will land in your inbox every Friday. Not a fan of newsletters? No problem! You can read the interviews here on the blog or you can subscribe to the RSS feed.
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My name is Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino and I’m an author and consultant with a background in product and interaction design. I studied at IDII which was one of the pioneering post-graduate courses in interaction design and I’ve lived in London for 18 years. I was the first UK distributor of the Arduino and three of my projects are in the permanent collection of art of design museums around the world but these days I tend to work as a leader in organisations with a climate mission. When I’m not working, I’m trying to get my feet all the way to the ground in downward dog and teaching myself how to knit.
When I was studying at IDII in 2005 and I had a class with Yaniv Steiner who forced us to start our own Wordpress.org instance to document our masters project. I hated figuring out PHP but eventually got the hang of it and just kindof kept going with it. My friends started doing weeknotes but I always had a problem with the intimacy of the format. I was never a Livejournal kind of girl and don’t really like writing about my personal life outside of the end of year reviews Molly Steenson started me on. So I keep things pretty professional or abstract. It helps that I live in England where people love cryptic crossword puzzles.
These days, I have two types of blog posts. A link dump I call ’Sunday Scraps’ which lets me close some tabs on my phone and regular work-related musings. I never have a plan, I just try to blog regularly. I find it a useful way to practice writing in addition to writing books. If I go back to my earlier blog posts, I can see a tangible improvement in my English (my mother tongue is French) so that’s pleasing. I usually write later in the day, probably after I’ve been mulling over a blog post idea for a few days. I write in about an hour or less and I rarely write drafts. If I can’t seem to finish a blog post, I take that as a sign that it’s not going to be very good so I just close my laptop. Sometimes I go back to it, sometimes I don’t and just start a brand new one. I’m very aware people don’t read so I try to make my point inside of 600 words. I also never post my blog post content on other platforms. I know it’s a little bit pointless now with LLMs but my writing is my copyright, not anyone else’s.
I have written too many blog posts on my very uncomfortable sofa to think that physical space has anything to do with my blogging. And I’m a big fan of Bukowski’s 1992 poem ‘air and light and time and space’ which puts that idea to bed. If you have something to say, you always find a way.
I host the subdomain designswarm.com/blog with dreamhost and the blog is a Wordpress.com instance that is linked to it.
Not really, I mean you’re just adding words to the internet. Unless you need to make a living from it, just write like nobody’s reading. Unless you’re being a wanker, in which case, don’t. Just go to the pub with your mates.
I don’t take donations, I don’t have a substack, I don’t use Medium anymore (I extracted my posts from there years ago) and I generally don’t trust third party platforms for bloggers. I also don’t think I should be paid for my blog posts because they’re a calling card. The good stuff comes from people who read me and then want to work with me. If I was to charge for it, I’d limit the number of people who might want to work with me which is silly. And I have books people can buy or borrow from their local library instead. So that’s enough monetisation of thoughts for one person I think.
I’m a big fan of things magazine which has been going for a long time. My friend Russell also blogs about 5 things he finds interesting and there’s always some lovely things in there. You should talk to him and Matt Webb about blogging.
If Scottee wrote a blog, I would read it. In the meantime, I really enjoy his annual podcast.
This was the 88th edition of People and Blogs. Hope you enjoyed this interview with Alexandra. Make sure to follow her blog (RSS) and get in touch with her if you have any questions.
You can support this series on Ko-Fi and all supporters will be listed here as well as on the official site of the newsletter.
Jamie Thingelstad (RSS) — Piet Terheyden — Eleonora — Carl Barenbrug (RSS) — Steve Ledlow (RSS) — Paolo Ruggeri (RSS) — Nicolas Magand (RSS) — Rob Hope — Chris Hannah (RSS) — Pedro Corá (RSS) — Sixian Lim (RSS) — Matt Stein (RSS) — Winnie Lim (RSS) — Flamed (RSS) — C Jackdaw (RSS) — Fabricio Teixeira (RSS) — Rosalind Croad — Mike Walsh (RSS) — Markus Heurung (RSS) — Michael Warren (RSS) — Chuck Grimmett (RSS) — Robin Harford (RSS) — Bryan Maniotakis (RSS) — Barry Hess (RSS) — Ivan Moreale — Ben Werdmuller (RSS) — Cory Gibbons — Luke Harris (RSS) — Lars-Christian Simonsen (RSS) — Cody Schultz — Brad Barrish (RSS) — Nikita Galaiko — Erik Blankvoort — Jaga Santagostino — Andrew Zuckerman — Mattia Compagnucci (RSS) — Thord D. Hedengren (RSS) — Fabien Sauser (RSS) — Maxwell Omdal — Jarrod Blundy (RSS) — Andrea Contino (RSS) — Sebastian De Deyne (RSS) — Nicola Losito (RSS) — Lou Plummer (RSS) — Leon Mika (RSS) — Veronique (RSS) — Neil Gorman (RSS) — Reaper (RSS) — Matt Rutherford (RSS) — Aleem Ali (RSS) — Nikkin (RSS) — Hans (RSS) — Matt Katz (RSS) — Ilja Panić — Emmanuel Odongo — Peter Rukavina (RSS) — James (RSS) — Adam Keys (RSS) — Alexey Staroselets (RSS) — John L — Minsuk Kang (RSS) — Naz Hamid (RSS) — Ken Zinser (RSS) — Jan — Grey Vugrin (RSS) — Luigi Mozzillo (RSS) — Alex Hyett (RSS) — Andy Piper — Hrvoje Šimić (RSS) — Travis Schmeisser — Doug Jones — Vincent Ritter (RSS) — Shen — Fabian Holzer (RSS) — Courtney (RSS) — Dan Ritz (RSS) — Jeremy Bassetti (RSS) — Luke Dorny — Thomas Erickson — Herman Martinus (RSS) — Benny (RSS) — Annie Mueller (RSS) — SekhmetDesign — Gui (RSS) — Jamie (RSS) — Juha Liikala (RSS) — Ray (RSS) — Chad Moore (RSS) — Benjamin Wittorf (RSS) — Prabash Livera — BinaryDigit (RSS) — Radek Kozieł (RSS) — Marcus Richardson — Emily Moran Barwick (RSS) — Zach Barocas (RSS) — Gosha (RSS) — Ruben Arakelyan (RSS) — Manton Reece (RSS) — Silvano Stralla (RSS) — Mario Figueroa — Benjamin Chait (RSS) — Cai Wingfield — Pete (RSS) — Pete Millspaugh (RSS) — Martin Matanovic (RSS) — Coinciding Narratives (RSS) — Arun Venkatesan (RSS) — fourohfour.net (RSS)
If you like this series and want to help it grow, you can:
Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome.
Email me :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month :: See my generous supporters :: Subscribe to People and Blogs