Graphic Rating: where I learned design in public.

Welcome. If you came looking for Graphic Rating, here’s what’s available today.

Graphic Rating launched on March 19, 2008 with the tagline accurate rating in the visual area. A few weeks later, What is Graphic Rating? set out the idea:

That meant short, opinionated reviews of a web that was busy redesigning itself: Meebo.com has the looks, Wal-Mart’s new logo lacks power, Twitter redesign is not impressive, Facebook: simple to perfect interface design. When Google launched Chrome in September, the blog covered it as it happened, first predicting it will be a hit for 2 months and then asking whether it rules or sucks.

Interviews started that summer, beginning with concept artist Jesse van Dijk, then at W! Games in Amsterdam.

The site redesigned itself too. It got a new style in July, and by November version 4 had a logo with five rating stars built into the name. In October it joined webdesign.Alltop.com (“Wheeeeeeeeee! Yes, I’m happy!”), and it got a sibling, Trailers Rating, a dead-simple site for movie trailers.

After six months of rating other people’s work, the blog launched its own awards: the Graphic Rating Annual Awards, or Gratings. Readers voted in three categories, and the winners were announced on December 27, 2008:

The post signed off with a warning to the industry: “Next year pay attention to any redesign or change because we will too, and we are tough judges.”

In 2009 the posts got longer and more practical. There was a browser benchmark series on text and image rendering, WordPress cheat sheets and plugin roundups, CSS and XHTML best practices, and toolbox posts like My Web Design Toolbox: 25 tools and 15 Tools for Testing Your Website.

It had opinions too. You are not a Designer IF… listed 28 ways to fail the title, including “you only design and never code” and “you test your web pages only in Internet Explorer”.

In March 2009 I interviewed Guillermo Rauch, then an 18-year-old developer in Buenos Aires known for WP-o-Matic, MorphList and TextboxList. He went on to found Vercel.

By 2011 Graphic Rating was a full web design blog. It ran its first giveaway, a copy of CSS3 for Web Designers, started a HOT UI series with the first Windows 8 screenshots, and published 15 Alternatives to WordPress, Joomla and Drupal, one of its most discussed posts.

Quartz came first, in June 2009: 90 simple icons for files, folders, charts, books and social networks, released with Smashing Magazine.

Koloria followed in June 2012: more than 160 icons drawn pixel by pixel at 32×32, free for commercial and open-source projects. The launch post explained why it was free: “as designers and developers, we are responsible for creating a healthy working ecosystem.” It has been downloaded more than 50,000 times.

Both sets are credited to Graphic Rating on Icon Archive, 255 icons in total, and you can still download Koloria here.

I started Graphic Rating to learn, share and collaborate, and those reasons still apply. The work has changed: I design products now, more and more of them with AI and agents working alongside people.

gongea.com is where that writing continues. Read Back to blogging, part 2 for how part 1 shaped it, or see what I’m working on.