Welcome

I'm not a visual artist. I can't draw on paper or in Illustrator, and I'm not sure if I've ever come up with a new graphic idea. Logos, fine, but not actual art.

So how do I design? I piece it together.

I don't design from scratch, drawing my own art and creating something out of it. What I do is scour the internet for ideas - icons, textures, fonts, collections of sites, whatever else I can find. Often I'll play with some awful ideas for awhile until something just clicks, after which the layout itself will take a matter of hours to create. This site's layout, for example, took two months to background process, and three hours to create.

Similarly, I have trouble planning out entire musical works, even short ones. I try to do this in a number of ways, but I always stray from the plan. Usually, a piece comes together by playing in Finale (I don't hand-write anything) for a half hour, putting it down for a day, playing again, until a piece begins to form. Even when I have a concrete idea, it will turn into something different once I start working with the pieces (so to speak) of music.

You don't need to have a fully-formed idea to start creating. Just search, play, and get something down! Designing (and composing) from pieces, fragments of ideas, has almost always worked for me.

Labels: the process