Make Design, Not War

It’s been a good 18 months since I last put any real effort into my personal website. In that time I’ve done a huge amount of work on other websites, but in all the hustle and bustle of studio work I neglected to pay more than a procrastinator’s glance at my own work. So, in the midst of an oddly timed summer creative session I was able to find a couple days to at long last take the time to rebuild my personal website.

So, welcome to Make Design, Not War! I’ll be posting everything from samples of my own work to inspirational collections, critical essays, tutorials, peeks at my process, free downloads, and more.

Why a blog?

I’ve tried to maintain elaborate Flash or HTML portfolio sites in the past and my experience was this: I can only keep up with that sort of website if I’m willing to turn down professional work. After looking around a lot at sites of other artists, I eventually came to realization that I already have a great platform in Wordpress to publish my work. I’ve been working with creating custom Wordpress themes for over a year anyways, and with the ease of being able to add content and mashup external features (like Flickr), I knew it was the right decision. Besides, I’ve been writing for other blogs for a while now – it’s high time that I launched my own.

Why Make Design, Not War?

1) I like the simple, to-the-point notion of the statement. It’s political enough to trigger a dialogue, but not enough to offend. It conveys a preference towards the creative process rather than a process driven by conflict and strife. I’m not overtly anti-war, or anti-violence; I’m not even against the use of tension in day to day life to work out problems – the statement is to say, rather, that there’s usually a better solution to most of the world’s problems if we’ll only take the time to think them through. Finally, the statement is cliche’ and playful enough to provide the right tone for what I intend the site to be in the long run: just another fun destination for like-minded creatives.

2) ‘Make Design, Not War’ is now officially the “personal” front of my work. Epic Era Studio will remain the professional business front. This division is more for bookkeeping purposes than any other reason.

Technical Notes:

Starting with the gorgeous Fresh News theme from WooThemes, I’ve taken a few days to skin and mod it to my liking; adding various plugins, reworking some of the original styling and programming, etc. to make it my own.

I looked a lot at the blogs of some of my favorite designers before starting: SignalNoise, NoPattern, The KDU and many more. I’ve been an especially big fan of the way that James White has organized his work at SignalNoise by separating out “art” from “content” by keeping ordinary content in the Wordpress framework and presenting straight art content in some of the clever Flash based components that are out there (FlashLoaded).

What else is here?

A Tiltviewer based art gallery
My Modern Mythology project
About Me Page
My Client List

I’ll be adding a good amount of content and new features in the weeks to come – so feel free to subscribe to my blog feed to get updated when I post stuff.

Cheers!
Brandon