I made a mistake. Three weeks ago I settled into a nice blogging flow and had a decent stream of published posts. It felt so good to get ideas out of my head. Sitting on a handful of nearly done posts, I was putting the finishing touches on one of my precious thoughvomits, I got the bright idea to spice it up by adding some illustrations…

Never do this. Well, you can, but I’ll explain.

I wanted to inject a bit more personality into my posts. This however sent me on a search for the perfect drawing app. Most drawing apps are composition tools and tend to output raster, but I couldn’t shake the idea that I wanted vector so I could tweak stroke weights, make it responsive, and even add dark-mode support. It’s possible to convert raster to vector by creating an outline in Illustrator… but then I’d be using Illustrator.

Why aren’t there good SVG drawing apps? Most vector creation apps are path tool apps, not pen to screen. I’d rather drive a turtle around the screen than drag anchor points around. I have Prompts, which can output SVG but should I fork it and make someting more immersive? And if I’m forking that, maybe I should fork signature_pad and add desynchronized: true to the 2d context, so that my drawing surface has super low latency. Do I need to buy another URL or a just use a subdomain?

Ok. Maybe don’t do that. Go back to the Illustrator plan. I probably shouldn’t just put my first drawing up there though. I should practice a bunch beforehand. I probably need to start a daily drawing habit. I need to reinstall that habit tracking app on my phone.

I hope you can see it now. Don’t do this.

I scope creeped myself. I had a good blogging rhythm, but I over-extended myself. It’s okay to chase a big idea, but I should never block one output stream with something I’m not even currently doing. If I already had a drawing habit and a pool of hundreds of drawings to source from, then yes, I should leverage and share those in my blog. But trying to muster up a new hobby and a new process workflow and audition new software applications… that stopped me in my tracks and killed my momentum.

It’s a novice mistake. Next time, rather than trying to create something out of thin air, I should leverage something I’m already doing in order to spice up my blog posts. I hope you like banjo ditties.