People and Blogs: Chris Butler

Let's start from the basics: can you introduce yourself?

Hi, I'm Chris Butler. I'm a digital graphic designer. I work at Newfangled.com and write at Chrbutler.com.

I was fortunate to study art and design at RISD.edu. While majoring in Film/Animation/Video, I became interested in motion graphics, which began a winding path toward interaction design.

Though I've been happily settled in Durham, NC for over a decade now – the longest I've lived in one spot! – I've lived in many places; the most distant was Penang, Malaysia.

I was recently asked to choose three adjectives to describe myself. The first that came to mind was "curious." I have more interests than I have time to pursue them. Many come up in the course of my writing. More on that in a bit...

What's the story behind your blog?

I'm not sure there's much of a story other than that I've always wanted to maintain a record of some kind. I created my first webpage in the late 1990s and have tried to maintain the ability to do so ever since. I've kept several different personal URLs over the years, but my current one (chrbutler.com) – just the shortest viable and available version of my name when I registered it – has endured the longest.

I've written professionally at several different places. Newfangled.com has been where I've published the most practical writing on interaction design. I wrote the Interaction design column for PRINT Magazine for several years, contributed to their blog as well as their sister publication, HOW Magazine, and wrote a book published by HOW Books called The Strategic Web Designer. I've also written for SmashingMagazine.com.

But on my website, I'm less focused on a particular topic. I'm much more seasonal in the way I write there – sometimes longer, developed essays, sometimes very brief blog posts. Most of the time, I share my writing with my email list.

What does your creative process look like when it comes to blogging?

I keep a "Files" drive connected to my machine, and on it, a folder called "TEXTS." In it are a few sub-folders: Articles, Fragments, Journal, Notes. In those are thousands of .txt files. I back this up on another RAID drive and on the cloud.

Every day I create some kind of entry on that drive. If it's not a journal entry, I typically start with hastily writing down scattered comments about something I am thinking about and save it to the Notes folder. If I begin to develop that entry, I'll usually move it up to the root level. When it's finished, I file it under Articles. If it languishes for too long, I'll move it to Fragments. Every now and then, I mine the Fragments folder. Most of the time, I read over something and remark, "what on Earth was I thinking." But every now and then, I'll pull something back out of there and work on it again. A few months ago, I published an essay called "Personal Machines and Portable Worlds" that was the result of several resurrections from the Fragments folder – some nearly a decade old.

When I'm ready to publish something, I duplicate the .txt file to a Dropbox folder that syncs with my Blot.im account. Blot is a lovely, simple flat-file CMS. I've used it for many years now and would recommend it to anyone.

Do you have an ideal creative environment? Also do you believe the physical space influences your creativity?

I have these childhood memories of visiting my sister's room, which was always in a state of near-chaos, and being inspired by the energy in there. She'd often be making things and always had a creative spark that was just so different from mine. I began to associate creativity and disorder, which, for me, has been a lifelong irony because, back then, I'd return to my room, which I'd probably just meticulously cleaned. I'm still that way – I put a huge amount of energy toward creating and maintaining order. I've learned over the years that creativity isn't dependent upon either disorder or order. Both can feed it.

And so both are present in my working space. I'll probably always lean more toward order (this post on my setup will make that clear), but the disorder comes from having a lot of variety available around me. I love having interesting things to look at – even just a glance at something can inspire me and fuel me through the day. I am constantly shuffling the things on my office's display shelves to feed my mind with images and ideas that I can use.

A question for the techie readers: can you run us through your tech stack?

The post I referenced above will provide much more exhaustive detail on this, but to summarize:

I work at home, and my primary machine is an M1 Mac Mini. I haven't owned a laptop in many years. I like to keep my computer time focused in one place, for the most part (though I do have an iPad Mini, which is a very useful device and optimally sized, in my opinion). I connect into a large LG display and communicate via Zoom using a Sony a7c and a Shure SM7B connected through a Focusrite Scarlett interface.

I write with Ulysses and store all my text files on a 1TB NVMe SSD I assembled myself. I back up everything on a LaCIE RAID.

As I mentioned above, my blog is run on Blot.im and all its files are stored on Dropbox.

I'm an evangelist for maintaining an uninterruptible power supply (UPS). In a time of increasingly weird weather, power outages are becoming more common. The CyberPower CP1500 keeps us up and running so we can save our work and shutdown when we feel like it.

Given your experience, if you were to start a blog today, would you do anything differently?

Content-wise, I don't think so. I like the personal nature of my website and how its variety reflects who I am. If I were motivated to build a larger audience and somehow monetize that attention, then specializing in some way would probably be necessary. But that's not what my website is for.

What my website is for is, first and foremost, to be a record for me. I like that it traces interests and modes over the years, and I like that it's there for anyone to see. On that note, it's also for making connections. I have made numerous friends through engaging online. These are relationships that have developed far beyond digital acquaintance – they've gone deep and lasted for many years. I met of my very good friends because I commented on his blog and then he on mine. I love that the internet makes this possible.

Technically and creatively, of course I am often itchy. I routinely want to try out a new technology or platform and experiment with the design. I've revamped my site plenty of times, but the ease of the flat-file approach on Blot is hard to trade in for something that might offer me more creative options. It makes it easy for me to write and publish things, which has always been the point.

Financial question since the Web is obsessed with money: how much does it cost to run your blog? Is it just a cost, or does it generate some revenue? And what's your position on people monetising personal blogs?

The website's direct, yearly costs are:

• domain name registration: $16
• blot.im account: $40
• Dropbox account: $120

Total: $176

That breaks down to ~$15/month, which is a pretty cheap price for such an enriching hobby, I think.

Meanwhile, the site generates no revenue! Like some of your previous guests, it has created connections that have led to money through various side writing, speaking, or consulting work, but that's never been its purpose. When that happens, it's a nice thing, and I'm happy to leave it at that for now. (It has happened a handful of times, and in the aggregate, they have paid for the all-time costs of the site so far. I'd be fine with it if that wasn't true.)

My position on monetizing personal blogs is to each their own!

Time for some recommendations: any blog you think is worth checking out? And also, who do you think I should be interviewing next?

Patrick Tanguay's Sentiers (https://sentiers.media/) is a must. I will read anything that Maciej Ceglowski (https://idlewords.com/) writes. Erin Kissane recently wrapped a series examining Meta's role in the genocide of Rohingya people in Myanmar (https://erinkissane.com).

Lara Hogan's wisdom overflows here: larahogan.me. Reading Nicholas Magand (thejollyteapot.com) got me to loosen up on my blog. Maggie Appleton (maggieappleton.com) is inspiring. I like Carl Barenbrug's blog (carlbarenbrug.com), Chris Hannah's (chrishannah.me), and Jose Gilgado's (josem.co). Scott Buffington's "Full Pints" posts always yield something of interest (irongeek.net).

I just met Robert Rackley through my own blog and I've been enjoying catching up on his (canneddragons.net).

When it comes to the weird, I never miss a post from Håkan Blomqvist (ufoarchives.blogspot.com) or The Anomalist (anomalist.com).

Final question: is there anything you want to share with us?

I wrapped my last episode of my Design Tomorrow podcast nearly five years ago, but I still think it's good and worth a listen.