20nine Newsletter

This is not a blah-g. It is not a spewing of observations and disconnected thoughts. In other words, this is not just another blog, either. This is not another site of text and pictures and captions and ruminations. It’s a fast and loose forum for ideas of what’s new, what’s interesting, and what’s next. Inside and outside of branding, marketing and design. Will it be bold? Definitely. Brash? Maybe. Boring? Never.

How did Not A Blah-g come to be?

Theories float around in the vast and expanding blogosphere that instructs you to change your layout, your design, your strategy, to bring in more readership, to make your blog the best it can be. Make it more personal, write about something you love, and so on. People take these five or ten overdone tips and tricks and launch their own blog, an attempt at creating the next best thing. But outside of the blogosphere, reality sets in: anyone can make a blog using templates and cookie-cutter creative approaches. Anyone can write about what they ate for breakfast, the latest movie they saw, their predictions for the Oscars, or the train ride they took to work today—but what makes it unique? What makes the perspective and voice so fresh and captivating? With so many blogs existing out there on the Internet, what makes a blog worth someone’s time?

Imagine yourself eating a sandwich in your kitchen. A classic, simple, PB&J on a paper plate. You sit at your kitchen table munching away. It's enjoyable—but it’s not memorable. It doesn’t make you feel out of the ordinary. It’s the same as yesterday’s lunch, and it will be the same as tomorrow’s lunch. The sandwich satisfies your hunger, so it does its job, but when you're finished it’s far from your mind. You face the challenge of making this experience remarkable.

Say you visit an entertainment blog every morning to catch up on the latest gossip. You’ve got your fill of celebrity scandals to last you through the day, and then you lose interest. When you exit out of that window, the blog takes on the role of that peanut butter sandwich you eat in your kitchen—it doesn’t become an experience, it becomes just another website you visited that day. It isn’t remarkable in any way.

That may be your blog, but that is not our blog. Because we are not that sandwich that bores you. We strive to be more than just readable. We strive to be remarkable. We want people to talk, to share what they’ve experienced. That’s the mission each time out. In the end, we are not launching a blog, we are creating something worth your time.

This is an introduction of a limitless vat of ideas, of stories, of pictures. It is a platform for our inspirations, and a showcase of our talents, our experiences, and our passions. We fused together our insights, innovations, and visions to bring to life something personal, beyond just e-mails, or Facebook, or phone calls.

As much as this is for our industry, it is equally for ourselves. It is an opportunity for you to see us, hear us, and remember us; and an opportunity for us to be seen, heard, and remembered. It’s a display of our individual selves and how we incorporate our personalities into our work. This is Not a Blah-g; this is your chance to experience 20nine.

Check out Not a Blah-g.