About
This is my ambling about page. I’m employed as a Web Designer, although that may not be evident from this bricabrack blog and photo fragments. Maybe I will design an actual site again. For now I want to be a reckless user.
It was the mid-nineties. While pursuing a fine arts degree in scientific illustration, I experienced a mild technophobia. Should I draw plants? bats? bones? guts? More importantly, should I be an art punk or a computer geek? While I pondered I should have registered lots of domain names. Short ones. I thought I would be an artist. In fact, I have a note my Grandmother wrote after my first show that states that I am a real artist. Still, the simple act of uploading an image was powerful, so I embraced the cutting edge technology (which happened to be a quadra and a syquest drive).
While working print production jobs, I relished morning hours before work, when I would mark it up old school with Simpletext and Fetch. Manually typing an html document to present a new image on the world wild web. Animated gif spinning eyeball, baby! When I started working a web job, I channeled the digital behavior into that. Tweaking slivers of images to pixel perfection, celebrating the diversity of web browsers, and trying to keep it real with the style sheets. Looking back over the years, the industry has changed a great deal.
At some point, bored reader, tragedy struck. As the web became a more connected place, I developed inhibitions about public expression with the medium. Also, I formed notions about my digital self and analog self, work self and home self. These distinctions were not helpful. Well, maybe they are in some “not-safe-for-work” instances. So this is my rusty attempt to say hello. Imperfectly and sporadically. I hear life is short; besides, it’s just the world wide web. Who could possibly stumble across it?
Hi, I’m Ben, a Designer in Athens, Georgia.