Foliosite and archive for Michael Bojkowski aka okinterrupt
About this site
Publication Design
Type Design
Identity work
Education Portfolio
Research Projects
Res >^..^<
Essay:
My life as a blogger
1995-ish
I first I graduated from University in 1995. I had been enrolled in a Bachelor of Arts (Graphic Design) and finished with a Bachelor of Design. It was a pretty weird time to be studying graphic design. Design education was racing to keep up with technology, whilst questioning whether or not these emerging technologies (such as Desktop Publishing and Website Design) were actually going to help or hinder designers in the future. I remember tutors eyeing students suspiciously as we fumbled our way through early Macintosh apps like Ready, Set, Go! and Quark Xpress—which there was no formal training for at the time.
Truth told I was oblivious to the online world whilst studying. What I had embraced, along with a select group of friends, was a digital rather than manual, way of working. Sounds weird now, but they were still teaching us how to make photographic plates for printing at this time—although I don’t think that would have been the case shortly after I graduated. Technology was moving that rapidly.
1996–1997
It took me a few months to land my first proper design agency job. I’ve never been a much of a networker… at least not in person… so I was determined to find a job on my own merits. There were only two of us designers at Artvaak (spelt wrong when they registered the business name) but I witnessed the business grow in many other ways during those couple of years.
Being the new guy and a recent grad, I was assigned the task of working out how to build a website. Along the way I developed a kind of free wheeling experimental site for Artvaak called ‘Vaak’. I joined online communities to pick other designers brains and developed bonds with fellow internet newbies via fledgling social media networks such as Firefly and, later Geocities.
Geocities is probably where I started blogging, although the term hadn’t been invented yet (‘Geocity-ing’ wasn’t super catchy). Geocities was a place to experiment with designing in early forms of HTML by trying to get tables to work and trying out various ‘pixel fonts’ that were legible in photoshop at tiny sizes. I had a site called, appropriately enough TheLab (no space) at geocities.com/SoHo/Lofts/4744. There was a lot of gibberish on there, much of it transferred over from the Vaak site which had grown to become too wacky and idiosyncratic to be associated with Artvaak’s main site.
1998
I stayed at Artvaak for a couple of years (maybe less) before going freelance. With this new found independence I also wanted to be a bit more ‘grown up’ with my personal website, so it was goodbye ‘theLab’ and Geocities and Hello to Filler (byline: No Obvious Killer). This was the self-depreciative title I gave to a kind of scrapbook of layout experiments, bits and bytes of writing and lucid image-based ideas. In other words, it was still a bit of a mess. This also was the year I decided to take a trip to London. It was a spur of the moment, two week getaway type of deal. Loved it. A year later I would move over there for good…
1999
Getting a foot hold in London was tough. I soon realised how easy it was to go from sleeping on someone’s floor with no money, the worst case of flu you’ve ever had and the only relief being trips to Easy Everything on the nightbus just to keep your family and friends up-to-date—to having a reasonably comfy job, a room of yer own and London as yer oyster—in a relatively short space of time. Before leaving for the U.K. I shifted Filler along with all my online shambolic ramblings over to Apple’s free hosting service. Filler became my online journal as well as a self promotional tool and HTML design sandbox.
2000–2003
Filler took various guises from 2000 to 2004. Each version was hand-coded, and self-hosted... as was the way back then. I enjoyed having a place to mess about online and the stats were okay… people were visiting it. It did take a lot of time to maintain properly though. I also started a ’Logo Archive’ which ran for a couple of years. Eventually I got a bit board of all this coding as setting up a decent foliosite became more of a challenge. Blog writing was put on hold as I was swept up in my freelance life in London.
2004
Brandnew was a new site and design publishing venture I started in 2004, with some great contributors, with a relatively short life span. Its design roots were planted firmly in the realm of print (complete with faux crop marks) and there were real live interviews with creatives such as Michael Gillette and Tatty Devine plus profiles on records lables like Teenbeat, all designed and hand-coded to a carefully considered template—which is what killed it in the end. Having to build the majority of the site in Photoshop and then cut it up was both laborious and yet felt weirdly lazy. It also took me away from writing which was part of the reason to start a new site in the first place.
What did live on was a spin-off ‘hobbysite’ originally created to run alongside brandnew, but soon took on a life of its own. NMCA took the logo archive idea from a few years back and replaced logos with magazine covers. There are a number of places you can go now to see curated collections of magazine covers, back in 2004 there was really only NMCA. Other similar hobbysites tended to focus on very specific titles or the celebrities that graced them. NMCA was unique in coming from a design perspective first.
2006
Between 2004 and 2006 it was enough to keep adding to and evolving my personal foliosite and maintaining the NMCA. Offline I had spent a lot of time and energy in manoeuvring my career in to a place where I could investigate a key area of interest, i.e. editorial design. It wasn’t until late 2006 that my online ambitions shifted gears in a serious way. It was whilst working at John Brown publishing that Jeremy Leslie introduced me to WordPress and suggested that I make posting online ‘a habit’. I took his advice literally and, with this new blogging platform able to streamline a lot of the functions I was used to performing manually. I dove into this new realm with a site nicknamed ‘boicozine’.
2007
A year into blogging as ‘boicozine’ I was lucky to have a amassed a neat little crew of contributors. Namely, Mr Luis Mendo, Mr Simon Whybray and Mr Joe Bland. 2007 was also the advent of Press Publish, a kind of online publishing imprint which became the house for a range of ‘print-on-demand’ projects starting with Zine! (later renamed ‘archive’) which took the first three months of posts on boicozine and put them into printed form. The idea was to invert the process a lot of traditional publishers were having to consider and go from blog to print rather than the other way around.
2008
Looking back, you could say 2008 was the year a creative community of blogs blew up. It’s Nice That and Kitsune Noir (i.e. The Fox is Black) had launched the year before and had snowballed in 2008, whilst previously popular creative forums such as Computerlove and Newstoday were struggling to keep current. It was around this time that Boicozine was mentioned in Print magazine as a design blog to visit. Visitor stats were going through the roof like nothing before.
This encouraged me to try and expand boicozine beyond the confines of a WordPress template. I investigated many different ways to publish content online such as via Flickr photostreams (pre-Instagram). The most successful format though turned out to be video. Video would become increasingly important to Boicozine (and later Linefeed) as a way of reaching out to creative communities from all corners of the globe.
2009–2010
…or rather 31st December 2008. That was the date boicozine changed name to Linefeed. I started the year afresh with a new name and a considered identity for, what I was increasingly seeing as, an online brand rather than a stand alone blogsite.
LineRead #1 was published early this same year. Taking the idea behind 2007’s ‘archive’ print-on-demand project (i.e. turning blog posts into printed pages) LineRead utilised a relatively new (at the time) online publishing platform called MagCloud. This larger, more lightweight and brightly coloured format seemed to really click with followers.
The magazine review videos I started posting in the year before were blowing up too. As the videos got longer, they picked up more and more viewers from all over the world. A video review of ‘a decade in magazines’ clocked in at almost an hour and was viewed over 2,300 times. Who knew people had the time to sit through a hour long video online (this was pre-YouTube).
2010
In 2010 I gifted Linefeed it’s own unique URL at linefeed.me. A second issue of LineRead was also produced based on a fascination with the occult. This turned out to be the most successful issue to date. This focus on expanding the site beyond a mere blog and it’s the realms of print and video was only starving off the inevitable though…
As Twitter and Facebook hit their stride, the conversation that previously flourished via blog comments, simbiotically forming communities that helped breathe life into blogs—bled over into 140 characters or less bytes of chatter or reactionary / incomprehensible Facebook comment streams.
I’d always valued having a blog as a way to reach out to and talk about specific topics with like-minded people. With the social aspect seriously diminished I began to question the what Linefeed was and whether or not it was interesting and relevant to anyone any more. I didn’t want to be talking to myself all the time. Where was the fun in that?
2011–2012
A third edition of LineRead was released in 2011, summing up the decade from 2000–2009. Roughly a year later, all 3 issues of LineRead would appear in the exhibition ’Graphic Design: Now in Production’, co-organised by Walker Art Center and Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, that looked at designer-makers and self-publishers.
At one point I found myself being invited (along with fellow exhibitors) to present at the Smithonian in New York. I couldn’t get over to New York at the time (and had no public speaking experience at the time) but I did accept an invitation to do a live version of my magazine review videos at the Facing Pages event in Arnhem in 2012, partly because it meant getting to hang out with my good friend Luis Mendo and doing some work in Amsterdam once again.
Indeed, I found myself travelling loads and splitting my time between many different clients including Grafik (for whom I designed issues 187 through to 193), Wallpaper*, Wired and various titles for Ink, one of the world’s largest publishers of onboard magazines. Ultimately though, after the accolades and amazing opportunities blogging had allowed Linefeed would fall into neglect…
2013
At the beginning of 2013 I became convinced that blogging, as I was first introduced to it, was over. There seemed to be a renewed hunger for longform content and for offline reading. I took this as a very positive evolution for independent publishing and adjusted the Linefeed blog to suit.
Although I had hone my skills and had become increasingly confident and adept at writing the churn would still prove too much when trying to balance freelance work and other experimental publishing pursuits (see also, Bojvlogski & Res >^..^<). There would be more of this to come but the blog format had run it’s course, and could no-longer compete with the tidal wave of social media that swept aside all else in it’s path. Having said that I’m still keeping an eye out for any future revivals. 😉
The Link Rot is real.
As at January 2025 Filler, Boicozine and Linefeed no longer exist as singular sites but you can find bits of them online by sifting The Internet Archive. I don’t have a complete archive that’s easy to sift through but there are many posts that have been captured awaiting reposting at some distant time, who knows when. In the meantime, keep yourselves nice and thanks for stopping by.
— Michael Bojkowski (updated 2025)