Over the last one and a half years I've been writing more than 120 articles that I published either through my weekly email list, or randomly on Medium or other outlets.

But what I always struggled with was that there is no place where you can find them all. There hasn't been an archive where you can browse through all my recent articles, and there was no place where I could post some more personal thoughts - Until now!

Today I'm happy to launch this blog/magazine. It's called DESK, exactly the same as my weekly email list.

What will you find here?

I'll keep my weekly email list, and subscribers will always receive my writing in advance until it appears on this blog a couple days later. However, there are many more articles and topics I'm planning to write about in the future, and they can be found right here.

If you're new to this blog, the best way is to get started with the MOST POPULAR articles on the Homepage, or browse through some of the topics which you can also find on the sidebar on the homepage.

The process of designing this blog

Designing this blog turned out to be more challenging than it seems, but mostly because I was designing for myself. We went through many design iterations because there was a sweet spot we wanted to hit. Here are some of the goals I wrote down:

1. Blog should have a magazine feel, but not too polished.
2. Blog should feel personal, even a bit messy & inspire browsing/digging behavior.
3. Make it easy for returning reader to see if something is new since last visit.
4. Inspire first time readers with popular articles, long time readers with topic depth.
5. Design blog for "evergreen" content. Give a sense of timelessness. There is no old.
6. Make it easy to manage (for me as author)

If you're interested, let me walk you through a couple example sketches with a few casual/internal notes - Imagine these screens just as "mood screens" to get a feel where we wanted to go during the process.

And that takes us to today.

If we achieved all the goals we wrote down in the beginning can only be told in the future. I'm personally very happy with how it turned out, and knowing a blog like this is never done, I'm excited to improve it further in the next few weeks.

Currently on my To-Do list:

1. Add related/more articles below each article to give you more to read.
2. Add more articles from my archive.
3. Optimize some mobile issues
4. Fix the navigation issues I have across all my pages.

On this note I want to give a big high five and thank you to Lu Yu who helped me go through many design iterations and Stefan Kaltenegger who did a fantastic job with implementing the blog on the technical side. THANK YOU!

I hope you will enjoy digging through this blog and I'm excited to share new articles with you on a regular basis that are different to the ones you're used to.

If you have questions, feedback or just want to send some love I'd love to hear from you @vanschneider on Twitter.

See you soon again,
Tobias