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There’s A Niche, You Just Have To Find It

A few weeks ago I talked about starting a new blog, Flyosity, and the ideas I had for hitting the ground running. Those ideas mainly revolved around small tweaks I made for search engine optimization purposes, so in this post I wanted to talk more specifically about content decisions and how things are going so far.

Focus

My focus is on Mac-related interface design topics:

• Icon design
• Mac software interface design
• iPhone software interface design

So far I’ve been pretty faithful to those broad topics, nailing at least one in each entry I write. Why those topics? I felt they were under-served at the moment. There are some great forums that focus on these topics (MacThemes, Jelly Labs come to mind) but not many individual voices I could read on a regular basis. Don’t get me wrong, there are some serious all-stars in the Mac and iPhone design community (I try to follow them all on Twitter) but they tend not to post highly-descriptive articles about their work. An icon release is fantastic, but for Flyosity, I wanted to talk more about why and how an icon was created, not just the release of it. I wanted my blog to be centered around learning and not just observing, mainly because I’m still learning.

Talk About What You (Sorta, Kinda) Know

I’ll be the first to admit that I’m still working on my photorealistic design skills, icons included. I’ve been designing for the web for so long that the transition to software design is taxing me a bit since much of it is new. Designing high resolution icons? Not something I’ve really done before, but that’s just the topic I want to cover on Flyosity as I think it’s interesting and challenging, especially to a newer designer. My goal is to put out as many tutorials as I can, mostly because it forces me to learn a particular technique so that I can write about it. Last night I posted an icon tutorial and it was something I’ve never really drawn before. As I wrote the tutorial I was learning as I went.

Google’s Been Kind

Because the topics I’m targeting aren’t very saturated yet, I’ve been able to slide up the results rankings for my key terms. At the moment I’m on the first page for “mac interface design”, “iphone interface design”, and “interface design blog” which is perfect for the content I’ve been writing. My site still has a PageRank of 0 but since there’s not a lot of similar content out there, I’ve been climbing up the results. I’d like to think that my SEO-related tweaks I made to my HTML source contributed but who really knows.