A page from blogshank.
Blogs: they're the greatest thing ever, correct? The tool by which everyday citizens can overthrow the cultural hegemony of the mainstream media and give us their version of the world, direct and unadulterated.
Well, in part. But on a more prosaic level, too many of them can be tediously similar, both in subject (either a single overriding passion or set of opinions, or else mundane musings on the everyday) and in presentation.
Thanks, thus, for blogshank, which manages to be both delightfully random and evocative and also visually arresting.
It is made up of scans of an actual diary, each double page entry covering a week and filled with sketched drawings of seemingly arbitrary events and encounters, as well as occasional reminders of real life appointments.
Of course, not many of us can sketch so well: blogger Mike Smith happens to be a Cambridge-based freelance graphic designer and illustrator who has also written a children's book, this under the name of Walter Smith.
Blogshank is, nonetheless, a beautifully simple idea, even if the pages presented leave you little the wiser about Mr Smith's life. He tells us:
"The blog is something I'm messing about with, but it's just beginning to find its own direction, and I'm interested in what's going to happen with it. I started it by doodling in my diary, and I'm trying to explore ways of describing what's going on in my life without a 'narrative' or a bunch of explicit opinions like a normal blog. And without a lot of meaningless doodling."
We like it. What do you reckon?
