by abduzeedo
Celebrate 2025 with Abduzeedo’s redesign! Reflect on our 2006 roots to see how design, luck, and determination fueled nearly two decades of creativity.
It’s officially 2025, and looking back to when Abduzeedo started feels like trying to recall a blurry dream. No big surprise there—2006 was nearly two decades ago! Sometimes I wonder how time manages to crawl along when we’re living it day-by-day, only to zoom by when we actually stop to reminisce about the milestones.
I still remember how Abduzeedo was born under some pretty rough circumstances. My office got robbed, leaving me without any of my precious gear. It was an absolute gut-punch at the time—like someone had pressed Ctrl+Z on everything I owned—but now it just feels like a life lesson. It was scary and frustrating to start from scratch, yet alone do it publicly on something we called the “blogosphere” back then. Oh, and did I mention I was writing in a language I barely understood? That was a real adventure. In hindsight, it seems like a series of carefully planned moves, but trust me, it was pure seat-of-my-pants decision-making plus a dash of luck. (A mix of good and bad luck, to be exact.)
Back in 2006, the tech world was an entirely different universe. The cloud was more of a fluffy dream than a reality, Twitter was actually fun (imagine that!), and sharing your every thought in 140 characters felt liberating rather than anxiety-inducing. I vividly recall the Obama campaign—how he and his team leveraged this “new” technology to make waves. And Digg.com! That place was a hotbed for all things cool, and it gave our Photoshop tutorials a massive boost. The term “influencer” didn’t exist back then, but I sure did get a bunch of freebies from running the blog. Now I sound like the design community’s version of grandpa. But hey, two decades ago is a pretty long time.
Over the years, Abduzeedo has seen it all. We went from just me and my business partner scribbling words on the screen, to having a full-on global writing team, then all the way back to just me and a friend in Canada/Europe, and eventually, circling back to me flying solo. As the (cheesy) saying goes, the only constant is change, and I’ve definitely embraced that. Abduzeedo started as a hobby, peaked over a decade ago, and is now back to being a hobby again—yet I can’t resist freshening it up with a new design pretty much every year. Some folks buy new sneakers annually; I rebuild my entire site.
Redesigning is my idea of fun: rolling up my sleeves to code, returning to Drupal, fiddling with CSS and JavaScript. I’ve even taken on Twig theming and brushed up on old PHP skills. The real game-changer now is AI—it’s made things so much easier and more enjoyable. Honestly, it’s re-energized me to keep this site running and to branch out into new areas like photography, SwiftUI, and Jetpack Compose. There might even be some design-career reflections sprinkled in (I mean, come on, it’s been over 25 years)—but that’s a whole other blog post waiting to happen.
For now, I’ll just say: I hope you dig the new look. If you have any thoughts or feedback—whether it’s “Whoa, this is awesome!” or “Hey, my eyes are burning!”—feel free to share. Let’s keep evolving together and see what this next year (or decade!) brings.
Happy New Year!
