on Things
A new series of, erm, things
There comes a point where trying to figure out why you’re doing something, what to call it, and how to explain it just ties a knot in your head. And then you realise it doesn’t matter. What matters is whether you enjoy making it.
And if people enjoy the thing you made, great.. but if they don’t, that’s okay too. Maybe it wasn’t for them or maybe the timing was wrong or maybe they were distracted by a cat video. Or maybe the thing just sucked. It’s hard to say. The point is you made it, and you put it out into the world, and now it’s not your problem anymore.
So here is Things. A series of, erm, things.
The first thing worth knowing is that there’s only one piece of everything (and no, we’re not trying to manufacture scarcity). The simple, honest, swear-to-god truth is that it’s not mass-produced so we don’t have to deal with inventory or distribution.
Having to make something and also be its marketer and salesman blocks the pipeline. You spend all your energy figuring out how to get it in front of people, trying to turn it into a business and to build an audience, then eventually one day you look up and realise you could have made ten other things instead of trying to hawk the one thing sitting in a box somewhere in the dark of a storeroom. We’ve been there before. It’s not great.
These Things tend to circle around a few themes we often think about. Asian culture and philosophy, typography, word as image, image as word. Playing around with them to see what comes out.
Growing up, most of the music, films, and books around me came from the US and the UK, so Asian culture wasn't something I thought much about, until I got older and realised how much history and depth had been there the whole time.
So Things is partly an excuse to dive in and learn. (Worth mentioning: I can speak and listen in Chinese but my ability to read and write remains somewhere between poor and aspirational. Germaine, thankfully, can actually read and write it.)
Each series comes with a short story that you may or may not care about, and it’s completely fine. There’s no need to read a 500-word concept to know if something is interesting. Most people decide in three seconds anyway.
Bilingual, which I wrote about here, will move under Things. Any future series will live here too.
Anyway, please enjoy.
P.S. The word “thing” appears 19 times above. Some would call this lazy writing. Others would call it subliminal marketing. I’ll let you decide.
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Felix Ng
Co-founder, Anonymous
@felix.anonymous