If you just landed here for the first time, I want to tell you what you’re looking at, because the front door of this blog has been hiding behind a bunch of creativity exercises, and that’s not what I want you to see first.
My name is Greg Williams. I’ve been teaching college-level graphic design since I was thirty-nine and a half years old, I’m sixty-four now, and at some point this past year I started writing down the stories, the teaching moments, the research, and the honest reflections I never had time to put anywhere while I was living them. This blog is where those end up. There are more than a hundred posts here right now. Some of them describe things that happened forty years ago and I’m finally getting around to telling them. Some of them are from yesterday. All of them are me trying to work out, in public, what I actually believe about design, teaching, creativity, failure, fatherhood, faith, and the things I wish somebody had told me when I was twenty-two and certain.
You should know a few things before you start reading.
First, this is my personal work. These are my own stories, my own research into creativity and design, my own opinions, and my own voice. None of what you read here represents my employer, and none of the views I express here should be attributed to any institution I’m associated with. I teach at a college, but this blog is not the college, and the college isn’t responsible for what shows up in these posts. I’ve built guardrails into my writing process, real ones, to make sure nothing I publish here breaches the media policies of my employer, and I check myself against those guardrails every time I hit publish. If something ever slips through anyway, it’s mine to fix, not anyone else’s to answer for.
Second, some of the names and some of the details in the stories here have been slightly modified to protect the privacy of students and individuals I’ve known over the years. If you think you recognize yourself in one of these posts and the specifics don’t quite match what you remember, that’s probably on purpose, and it’s because I care more about protecting you than about telling the story exactly the way it happened. The emotional truth is always accurate. The identifying details sometimes aren’t, and that’s a deliberate choice.
Third, and this is the one I want you to sit with for a second, you know, this blog is a growth curve, not an archive. I’ve been writing here long enough now that some of the early posts didn’t have the benefit of the research and the framework I’ve built since. I’m going back and tightening those as I learn more, so if you read something today and then read it again in six months and the edges are a little sharper, that’s by design. The blog is a living thing. It’s not a static record. I’m allowed to keep learning, and so are you.
And finally, on what’s actually in here. You’ll find stories from the year I lost everything and moved back into the back of my parents’ house at thirty-eight. You’ll find teaching stories from classrooms that worked and classrooms that didn’t. You’ll find a running thread of original research into creativity, the kind I’ve been building quietly for years, the kind that eventually turned into six hundred and fifty exercises and a system I use with my own students. You’ll find pieces where I’m honestly wrestling with faith, with politics, with what it means to be a sixty-four-year-old man still trying to figure things out. You’ll find an open letter to former students I’ve lost track of, because I lost my Facebook account to a hacker not long ago and with it I lost access to more than four thousand people who used to mean something to me, and I’m trying to find them. You’ll find all of that, and you’ll find more coming, because I’m not finished.
So welcome. If you’re a former student, I’m so glad you’re here, and please reach out. If you’re a teacher, or a designer, or a parent, or somebody who just got sent a link, stay as long as you like, read in whatever order feels right, and know that what you’re reading is one person’s honest attempt at leaving some of what he’s learned behind for whoever needs it next.
That’s what this blog is. That’s why it exists. That’s why I keep writing.
— Greg
