We know all too well the common and frustrating design scenarios clients present us with, such as wanting us to stretch images disproportionally, cramming as much information as possible in a small space so that you need a magnifying glass to read the text, or brushing off design best practices. Yet we seem to always have the same flat rebuttals to throw back, and furthermore, we repeat them time and time again.

If you’re reading this article, it’s likely that you spend a fair amount of time online. However, considering how much of an influence the Internet has in our daily lives, how many of us actually know the story of how it got its start?

You know that “inner child” we hear so much about — the one that’s supposedly deep inside of all of us?

Well, I live with it. As a matter of fact, I call him “Austin.”

In the five years I’ve been a parent, I’ve realized that the notion of the inner child is more than just a neat psychological construct. It’s very nearly a literal thing. As we grow up, we don’t change so much as drape layer after complicated layer of adult emotion on top of that inner child. The child doesn’t vanish; he just gets obscured and filtered.

You don’t get an evolved, new mature being. You get Austin with fifteen blankets over his head.

So you finally decided to step up your blogging game and build yourself a site with WordPress. You’ve install a pretty good free theme and have a few posts under your belt. After a few days, you get seriously bored with the "My blog kinda looks like everyone else" syndrome and start your search for some creative ways to make your blog stand out from the crowd.