True Colors

One of the fun things about being a designer is that I can change my own branding as often as I choose. Visual Creative is going on six years old, and with each major website redesign, I have tackled the branding all over again. We are now into the third iteration.

The work of branding and web design are pretty much inextricable. A website can be a portfolio, a business card, a store front, or the clothes you put on before you go to work in the aether. It's design can attempt timelessness, or be stylish and current, or focused on raw, powerful functionality. In this, branding and website have to work tightly together, or run the risk of creating too many impressions and a vibe that doesn't quite jive. Of course, rebranding is not without risk, but the exercise of refreshing is definitely worthwhile.

This time around, I am putting the emphasis on an emerging aesthetic of texture and warmth, a bit of analog randomness with a DIY ethos, and a punk celebration of imperfection (I do have those roots). I am embracing the artist here. There is always a tension between "artist" and "designer" and I have woven back and forth between focusing on the whole or the parts. (Should a "design" studio talk about "art"? I think so.)

In visualizing the whole, I see a symbol of dramatic beauty: the peacock and his glorious plumage. I have the good fortune to have peafowl in a park nearby, and I spent a frigid afternoon this winter photographing them. They were cold too, not in the mood to show off their feather trains, but they came close, so close, and shared their sparkling beauty with me quite casually.

In our culture a peacock is sometimes associated with strutting vanity, but they also are symbolic of qualities of integrity, compassionate watchfullness, benevolence, and renewal, through time and across cultures. Pride tempered by these qualities seems a lovely mode of approach to the creative impulses of both art and design, and it is the one I am working with these days. Maybe one of these months I'll get my 20-year-old peacock tattoo reinked, taking this refreshed symbol to another level of vivid embodiment.

So, welcome to the "new" Visual Creative, much the same, yet ever-renewing.