Why ‘Deliberate Objects’?

Starting this blog is a strange feeling for me.

In one sense it’s a very familiar thing: I blogged at ukfountainpens.com for about five years, and racked up over 500 posts.

In another sense it’s totally new: I’m not trying to restart ukfountainpens; maybe a better way to put it is that I’m trying to rhyme with it.

On a bad day I would confess that ‘buying stuff’ is my main, perhaps only, real hobby. On a good day I would put a different spin on it, and say that I appreciate objects that are well designed, and in many different areas of my life I put intentional effort into improving the objects I buy and use.

The goal for me is to find those definitive designs, those objects that feel like they are the way they are because someone really meant for them to be that way. Objects that are so fucking good, or so fucking distinctive, that every time you use them you are aware of it.

This is really what I was pursuing throughout the time I ran ukfountainpens.com, with my endless waves of buying and purging my pen tray. I was never a ‘collector’, looking to rack up dozens or hundreds of pens. I wanted enough to give me variety and stop boredom, but I was always looking to optimize, endlessly iterating towards some kind of perfect. (The reality of course is that tastes change, usage changes, available budget changes — so the goalpost of ‘perfect‘ is always shifting).

I approach many different product categories with this same dedication: researching, buying, evaluating, and ultimately banishing failures to begin the cycle anew. Wristwatches. Camera equipment. Bags. Headphones. Pocket knives and torches (flashlights for you Americans). Notebooks. Wallets. Even fragrances.

This is not a Wirecutter-style product review site. I am certainly not structured and impartial.

It’s not an aspirational lifestyle magazine. I do not live a glamorous playboy existence. I have no yacht — my garden has weeds and my sink has washing up.

It’s not a site for academic design essays. I can’t be fucked with footnotes.

And it’s not just a new pen blog. This time I’m going broader.

Instead, I’m hoping to give honest takes on some of the objects I have come to know and love: the ones that I chose deliberately, because they were designed intentionally and exude their quality and identity under the deepest scrutiny.

So there you have it: welcome to Deliberate Objects. And for me, welcome back to blogging. Let’s see where this takes us.