So what if you don’t get paid

Last week one of the Dutch websites I frequently visit to check the Mac and Print news (Mac-Zone.nl) decided to quit and that was too bad. They had lots of visitors but the original crew couldn’t find the time to keep pushing out short stories and news each and every day. I enjoyed reading their articles. But having run a Dutch website focussed on Print and Graphic Design Techniques myself for over six years now, I totally understand how difficult it can be. Writing, interviewing and doing the research for an article takes up huge amounts of my time. If it’s so hard and it takes up so much of my time then why would I even bother? Why don’t I just spend my spare time flippin’ burgers? At least then I’d get paid right?

Sure. But that’s not why I got into blogging. Here’s a little secret I want to share with you and I’ll be Radically Honest: I have never blogged for you. I started my Dutch website MacMojo.nl six years ago for one person only and that’s me. I started to blog in order to clean up my desk and computers actually. I had all these cool and very good bookmarks, PDF-files, ICC-profiles, Distiller joboptions, presets and short demo-films scattered on my laptop, iMac, iPod and my G5. I had a big pile of useful magazine’s, pages I had ripped out of brochures, documents and even forum-discussions I had printed long ago. This pile of information was becoming so big I couldn’t manage it any more. I wanted to be able to find specific information I was looking for fast. I wanted to download specific settings for InDesign, Photoshop or some other App where ever I was working. Be it at home on a laptop or at the office. If someone else wanted to read along, hey they were welcome, but adding comments was not possible.

But there was another reason. The company I worked for was really only interested in print. ‘Print is where the money is’, was what they said. (Yeah right. A lame statement even in those years). There wasn’t anything I could do to change their mind so that left me with two options: Quit my job and try to find a job somewhere else or use my evenings in order to learn more about internet, web design, trends, those new ‘Content Management Systems’ and all that. I decided to stop bitching about the internet and just start.

Of course I’m really a print-focussed kind of guy so it was obvious to me I had to publish about the printworld and -techniques. Thank God Adobe had recently launched InDesign and the entire printworld was getting turned up side down. Now all of a sudden a graphic designer was suppose to know about ICC, color management, PDF and dangerous stuff like ‘flattening’ and ‘transparency’. At the same time all newspapers and magazines required you to send in Certified PDF files now. Those made great topics for my blog. Of course I ran in to problems. I didn’t know everything so I was forced to find people that did.

And that’s the third reason I started that Dutch blog (and now this blog): I wanted to become better at my job. I wanted to know more than the other guy. I quickly found out I actually knew quite a number of great and dedicated professionals and they were more than willing to share their knowledge with me and the readers. I haven’t translated all those Dutch articles (yet) but I interviewed and got to talk to great Graphic Designers, Screenprinters, Authors, Front End Developers, Photographers, iPhone developers, illustrators, System Administrators, a colorblind ICC guru, Ad Experts, quite a number of people from Adobe, Enfocus, DTPTools and other pre-press companies.

And after more than six years I can honestly say that is what kept me motivated to keep digging for new articles and keep posting: Getting to know other professionals and finding out they were actually really nice guys and girls that did not mind sharing their knowledge and experience. So if you’re thinking about starting a blog; make sure you do it for the right reasons. Remember: Most bloggers won’t get paid besides the peanuts from Google Adsense and even if you do get paid (like I did for quite some time) it won’t motivate you to keep writing. But getting to know smart people and becoming better at your job will.