This is the first post on the new gongea.com, and it’s also a return. I’ve done this before.
Part 1: Graphic Rating
In 2008, which feels like a very long time ago, I started a blog called Graphic Rating. I wanted a place to learn in public, share what I found, and work with other people who cared about the same things.
It started small, with short design review articles where I looked at a piece of work and tried to say clearly what made it good or not. Then I began covering industry news as it happened. The launch of Google Chrome was one of the first big ones. After that I moved on to interviews, and that’s where the blog paid off in ways I didn’t expect.
The people along the way
Interviews gave me a reason to reach out to people whose work I admired. Many of them were already impressive back then, and several went on to lead their fields:
- Guillermo Rauch, now CEO of Vercel
- Martin LeBlanc Eigtved, founder of Iconfinder (now Magnific)
- Aidan Gibbons, creative director
There were many more. Looking back, I didn’t have a networking strategy. I was curious, and I had a reason to ask questions.
What I watched change
Running a blog for years means you watch the tools and the industry change around you, often while using them. Over that time I saw:
- WordPress grow from a blogging engine into the platform behind a huge share of the web.
- Web performance optimization become a field of its own, where before it was something a few people cared about.
- Photoshop slowly get worse for the work I was doing, which pushed me to Affinity, then Sketch, then Figma.
- Front-end development move from jQuery sprinkled over server-rendered pages to modern single-page applications.
None of these changes happened overnight, and I didn’t notice most of them while they were happening. Writing regularly is what made them visible to me afterwards.
Why part 2
The reasons I started in 2008 still apply: learn, share, collaborate. What’s different now is the work. I design products, and more and more of that work involves AI, including agents doing parts of the work alongside people. The tools are changing faster than they did during the Photoshop-to-Figma years, and I want a record of what I’m learning while it happens.
So this is part 2. Expect case studies, notes from the products I’m building, and some half-formed ideas that turn into longer posts later. If you were around for part 1, it’s good to have you back.