The journey has ended for my old design blog. Sadly, I had no time to invest in it and I had to retire the old Graphic Rating.
Across the years, I have had a blast writing content and learning at the same time. This blog taught me a lot about WordPress, jQuery, design community, importance of feedback, the opportunities generated by giving quality freebies.
I have also interacted with talented people like Aidan Gibbons – https://www.aidangibbons.com/ , Guillermo Rauch – https://rauchg.com/, Matt, Martin LeBlanc Eigtved – https://iconfinder.com and others.
I was asked to review a WordPress book, created a one-time design award, designed 2 icon sets – one distributed by Smashing magazine and used in so many projects. I have also hosted a giveaway – CSS3 for Web Designers by Dan Cederholm and sent it to the winner in Serbia.
What I will miss the most is the excitement when one of the posts was reaching out to a broader audience. I was checking Google Analytics on a daily basis in order to see the spikes in traffic.
I have also tracked a lot of shifts in the industry: the raise of WordPress, the fall of Yahoo, the design evolution – from gradient backgrounds, to wood patterns, to Skeuomorphism, to flat design, to material design and so on.
I recall missing the prediction on Google Chrome, thinking Google didn’t have what it takes to make a good browser. On the same note, I remember the old days when the search engine market was far more dynamic with new search engines, with a more potent Bing and Ask.com.