Blogging is a funny, tenuous thing. Borrowing equally from message boards, diaries, note-passing in class, and vanity presses, blogging as a form is bounded only by the size of thoughts. Imagine a blog as a tactile thing, and you’d have only a ribbon of words, fringed with comments, that slips across its own site while simultaneously, almost transgressively, broadcasting through RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds to many readers at once. As a reader, you pick up that thread in a million possible ways: by visiting the blog itself, through quick links on other blog sites, as a subscriber to that blog through an RSS aggregation tool, or via a Google search. Quicksilver and insubstantial, blogging exists outside of time in the way all sure-fire time sucks do. It’s a marvelous, addicting, occasionally junk-strewn thing to do.

From politicos to bored stay-at-home moms, now to graphic designers, the blog-bug has bitten deeply. As a communication tool, blogs embody that ambiguous urgency of a voice hollering in a parking lot. Is the sky really falling? Is that the shock of full-throated truth? Or has someone just smashed a toe with a grocery cart and gotten bloody loud about it? And what happens when all of us open up with our own yodels? I spoke with the creators of the leading graphic design blogs to get a taste of unbounded freedom, the future of the form, and the surprising revelations of thinking out loud.

Be a Design Group is an invitation to all people to participate in design. It is a place where designers can test new ideas, share observations, and comment on cultural trends. Their definition of design is intentionally broad so that the subject matter of all posts can be diverse and unlimited.