The year is coming to an end and as usual I want to take a bit of time to look back at what happened this year in my space workshop.
It’s been a great year with a lot of exciting publications and projects. My main focus this year was on writing and illustrating what I found to be fun. It turned out that having fun was not only enjoyable for me. My readers grew way more than I could have hoped for at the beginning of the year. The number of readers doubled, and my posts were read tens of thousands of times. Thank you so much! I am super grateful and it gives me so much energy to continue to write about space and to create illustrations to the best of my ability. Thank you for reading my blog.
I want to take a closer look at what went on this year on my blog, and also to make some reflections on next year’s ambitions.
New Friday Space Posts
This biggest outreach-related change this year for me, was the decision to send out public posts on a weekly basis. The past years my blogposts have been released on a very ad-hoc basis. In 2022, I wanted to have more stability in my release frequencies, so I sketched out a plan than involved:
- Publishing a space blogpost every Friday morning, CEST.
- Creating my own graphics for the posts.
- Creating space wallpapers for blog readers.
- Sending out a weekly newsletter in coordination with the Friday post.
Starting on April 1st (some date to declare a goal for the year!), I published the first “Friday post” and continued to do so every Friday until December, with one or two exceptions over summer where I focused on design and user experience. This leads me to the next point…
New Blog Design
Over the summer, I spent some time on the design and functionality of my blog. There were many elements I liked in the old WordPress-design, but since it was an old template (“gema”) there was a lot of functionality I was missing, like for instance a side-bar where I can have a newsletter signup box and stuff like that. It took me a few weeks to get the details in place, and I launched this new design in the late summer around the same time as…
Post Number 100
This year it was an absolute thrill to publish my blogpost number 100! Reaching this was a personal milestone and I am so happy to see that so many of you have followed long enough to celebrate this post achievement with me 🙂
Wallpapers, screensavers and QUIZ
A lot of new stuff was published this year in addition to my blogposts. I gave out smartphone decorations and screensavers, and I even managed to build an entire quiz section that now has its own menu point because it turned out to be more popular than I first thought it would be. My space designs are a part of a personal mission I am on to become better at illustrating, especially for scientific purpose. A great motivation factor for me is when I can share my work online, also when it’s work in progress. I always advocate that people shouldn’t be afraid to ask questions and that they expose what they are currently learning, and this illustration mission is my way of walking the talk. Everybody, even experts, are learning *something* and the better we are at sharing our progress and learning journeys, the better a place the world will be.
New Shop
I also started a shop where I sell my new space ABC poster. You find the shop in the menu.
The Year That Waits Ahead
Next year, in 2023, I want to continue writing about space and science. The last half of 2022 I started writing longer posts for Patreon as a part of a series of 5 chapters. The first series is about The Cosmic Ladder, and I really enjoyed writing these posts, so I want to continue to do that in 2023. This also means I will cut down on the public posts and focus more on the Patreon posts.
I will also be illustrating more, and especially am I going to focus on explanatory illustrations, i.e. visuals that can create a scientific understanding in the user. I want to focus on this to move more of my science communication from the “written medium” to the “visual medium”. I have often been asked to do podcasts, so people with no time or possibility to read my posts also could follow. The idea is great but after some test-recordings I realized it would be way too much work for me on top of everything else, so I have put the idea on the shelf and instead I will focus on illustrating. This can hopefully alleviate some of the same issues as occurs with reading.
Otherwise, I am going to focus on having fun! The best decision I made for myself in science communication was to stop worrying about what I should be doing and instead just writing and drawing what I *want* to do. I can only encourage you to do the same.
Thank you for following along in 2022.
See you next year <3
