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Happy New Year

“Thou hast birthed a human-child, Lydia” - illustration by Randall, made for the birth of my daughter Eliza © 1997
It might not look like it, but it’s been quite an eventful year for Unzipped. I’m still learning the ropes and frankly am making it up as I go along. There is no grand scheme, just some directives from FontShop BeNeLux, and observing how readership responds to certain changes and specific posts.

One of the main changes of course has been my switch to English at the occasion of Unzipped’s first anniversary in May. Initially this didn’t do zilch as far as readership goes, except… Suddenly, unexpectedly, after staying at roughly the same level for one year, traffic went up to 130% in October and then again up to 165% in November. Stephen assured me this was a telltale sign that after four months Google finally became aware of the language switch. Which dissipated any doubts I still might have had about abandoning my native language for Unzipped. I’m curious to see how it further evolves.

Unzipped | traffic 21/05/2006–31/12/2007
Especially humbling was when The making of FF Meta Serif was picked up by some other websites. Write-ups on a.o. the SpiekerBlog, Stephen Coles’ The FontFeed, Jürgen Siebert’s FontBlog.de and new player on the block I Love Typography generated a healthy number of referrals. Those numbers were all but dwarfed though once Daring Fireball linked to the story, effectively quadrupling my traffic that day. I still have a long way to go and indeed am an insignificant little speck on the internet. One big plus is that for every referral Unzipped now has an average of two direct hits.

A much smaller but nonetheless important change was the addition of the new My Type of Music album cover reviews, which proved to be as popular with the readers as Screenfonts, my reviews of movie posters. On the flipside I regretfully neglected the Unzipped Tutorials, but they will be back this year – and in English to boot! Also the ATypI Brighton Reports somehow fell through the cracks, so I guess I won’t be able to show my face in Saint Petersburg next year. I bow my head in shame. :/

This year’s newcomer will be Type Basics, a series of tutorials with basic information such as “what is a serif and a sans serif face” or “when do you use hanging and when lining numerals”, aimed at novice type users. I hope this will make Unzipped even more accessible to beginners. Furthermore I’ll try to write more investigative pieces and reviews, because these generate good feedback.

So, I hope you enjoy the ride – I certainly will. And if anything’s bugging you, drop me a line, or even better, write a comment. Have a gr8 year.

Personal New Year’s card for 2008

03.01.2008 - 22.52.36

Posted by Unzipper 4 comments Share on Facebook/Twitter

Comments

Most recent post

Keep it up, this is one of the blogs I enjoy the most! You too, have a great year and please look into doing another quiz!

04.01.2008 - 04.04.23

Posted by Pieter

'Unzipped' surely is one of my favourite blogs ! Especially 'Screenfonts' and 'My Type Of Music' are very enjoyable. Hope to see some interesting tutorials this year. Keep up the good work !!!

09.01.2008 - 09.56.22

Posted by Man From Gotcha!

So, Where's the action. This Site is awfully quite since the new year!

01.05.2008 - 01.23.43

Posted by kenny

Annual report season wreacked havoc on my writing schedule in the first quarter -- difficult to write when entire weekends are spent on consolidated financial accounts stuff. Dunno, but I have the impression I'm pretty much back on track. Fair enough, I still need to start up Type Basics, you've get a point there. Anything else?

02.05.2008 - 11.57.56

Posted by Yves Peters a.k.a. Unzipper

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