A brief history of Linefeed
This article was first publishing in June 2013 as a blog post on the Linefeed site. It’s a breif history of the blog and platforms used republished here as a matter of record.
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I started writing about stuff online just shy of 20 years ago now so I’d thought I’d throw myself down the rabbit hole to bring the history of this here blogsite (or whatever you want to call it) bang up-to-date. Here goes nuthin’…
1995-ish
This is the year I graduated from University. I 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.
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 the time — although I don’t think that would have been the case shortly after I left. Things were 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 place on my own merits. There were only two of us designers at Artvaak (spelt wrong when they registered the business) 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.
