Visual Communication: Blogging in the post-Tumblr World

Echo Park-based tastemaker and founder of Evil Monito, Rickey Kim, recently changed the format of his personal blog from the conventional copy and image format to a decidedly more progressive — or at the very least, tangential — format of an image with the accompanying text superimposed on top. Our initial knee-jerk reactions ranged from curiosity to outright support for a more art directed version of the web. While this may be just some minor and fleeting experiment, we think it’s a rather elegant solution to the post-Tumblr landscape of oft-uncredited image harvesting. Seriously, how many Tumblr accounts are even text-based? Even lowly old school blogs have become image-heavy, with more and more bloggers subscribing to the whole “a picture is worth a thousand words” axiom a tad too literally and liberally. We’re not sure if posts such as Mr. Kim’s will catch on at all, but if it brings about a new era wherein the signifier and the signified are embedded and thus always in context with one another, we’ll be proud to say that we supported it from Day One.