From Brainfart to Fever Dream: A Brief History of Four Letter Word
*This essay was updated on November 1, 2021
The start of my first blog roughly coincided with the start of 2009 and the halfway point in a long term temp assignment I took to hold me over between freelance gigs in February of 2007. Other than a regular paycheck the only major saving grace of that assignment was that with minimal expectations I had about 6 hours of quiet time every day to get my own work done. I wasn’t entirely without responsibilities but there always seemed to be long stretches of downtime bookending periods of furious activity the effect of which was enervating in a way you can only understand if you’ve experienced it yourself. Other than quit, I had two options. I could sit and stare at the ugly partition walls all day or, I could find a better way to channel my ennui. So, I decided to learn how to blog.
“PRESS” © Julia Swanson, 2013
I got this in 2013 at some point and I still laugh when I look at it because of how perfectly it describes covering events in my position as a blogger.
My earliest blogs were not particularly good, successful, or read outside of the few friends and family I coerced into reading them. They featured mostly bad photography and quickly devolved into a hodgepodge of innocuous links, photos and obnoxious Seinfeldesque observations that probably made me seem like I was going slightly insane. There was no real method to my madness and I happily flitted from blog to blog in rapid succession frankensteining new blogs from old with each iteration being a slight improvement on its predecessor. I went from “Ubiquitous,” to “30 Days of Yoga” to “Julia Lite,” and failure however frequent was irrelevant because like any good mad scientist it just gave me another opportunity for success. I filled in my office based downtime with tutorials on everything from editorial calendars to basic HTML. I made a lot of mistakes and committed all the major blogging sins; I wrote about myself, I had no real focus, and sometimes maybe I had a little bit too much.
Four Letter Word was born in January of 2012 as part of a class assignment during my second semester of graduate school. Tasked to pick a beat and blog about it I focused on underground culture in Boston, specifically nerd culture. This led me to Nerd Nite, an informal series of pseudo academic lectures started in Boston in 2003, which focused on everything from the super sciency to the truly arcane. Without a lot of in-class instruction all I could do was use what I learned as a photographer and a journalism student to gather the information I needed to produce my first blog post. I had a really good time working on it, I interviewed, photographed, and did follow ups with the presenters. I finally pressed “PUBLISH” on January 31st 2012 my first post, “Nerd Nite: A Night out for Nerds,” and despite the fact that my earnest efforts only met moderate academic success, I was emboldened by the small but enthusiastic readership I began to build.
As a jobless, recently relocated, post graduate, I decided that blogging was not just a good way to continue developing my nascent skills while I continued to look for a paying job, it was also a good way to preserve my sanity through the tedium of a potentially unending job search. So I reimagined and launched Four Letter Word version 2.0 in August of 2012 as a blog that focused on culture and innovation in the Greater Boston Area and beyond.
I didn’t need to blog, but I wanted to and in the face of endless hours of job juggling and the fruitlessness of my “real job” search it gave me a sense of validation and some hope for my future. Even if it wasn’t exactly lucrative, blogging was always an exciting process. It got me out, it kept me connected and I was always learning. If I wasn’t writing a post, I was developing my next story, outlining a project, finding interviews, editing images, promoting on social media, tweaking the layout, learning more about coding, and streamlining my workflow.
Over the next few years Four Letter Word continued to evolve as I waded back into the workforce. Averaging one to two posts a month I balanced blogging with a couple of jobs and covered an increasingly diverse series of public events, art shows, performances, installations, public art, and fashion as well as continued coverage of select Nerd Nite’s.
One of the main challenges I had was organization which because of my growing and diverse topic of posts meant I had to be really clear and intentional about categorization and overall blog organization. I had a few concerns as I continued to blog. One them was finding new content. Events and Nerd Nite was always a good time however, I really wanted to find some new content and I really wanted the blog to become more magazine like. To find what I was looking for I invited some guest bloggers to write features, resulting in five really fantastic collaborations. This allowed me to be more of a guiding hand and I also go to other peoples storytelling vision as an editor which was amazing in itself. It paid off and diversification bred success and readership increased. By 2017 Four Letter Word had published more than 45 different rotating features and was read by people in more than 120 countries worldwide.
My main concern as a growing blog was that people wouldn’t be able to find what they were looking for and my content would become repetitive. I was also concerned that the experience visitors had reading on the blog itself wouldn’t be optimal. I did an informal poll of users to better to figure out what I needed to change or tweak and from there was I was able to make some adjustments in font, font size, backgrounds, layout and format. Blog posts also expanded in topic and while I had already been experimenting with different types of blog posts including essays, interviews, podcast style audio, event previews, video, listicles, and perhaps most importantly photogalleries. I also started to explore more graphic style blog posts through infographics and eventually started moving more into information design as I started to exploring the next step in interaction.
Four Letter Word is a continuing adventure. Just as I think I’m done I find a new avenue to explore. Working on this project has done so much more than just teach me how to create engaging multimedia content it also gave me the confidence I needed to take another swing at freelancing and formed the base for some of my most recent photographic projects which in turn has brought me full circle back into the world of photography and digital art. Although Four Letter Word has had limited posts over the past two years, and is definitely a slimmed down version of it’s previous self it is in a constant state of evolution and remains one of the longest running and most fun projects I have ever worked on.