Artifacts

I have a pretty long net history. I remember how, the first time I heard about something called the “World Wide Web” I exclaimed, “Who needs that, when we have Gopher!” I built my first web page in Notepad, before there were any graphic browsers: you had to click on image files you wanted to download to your computer, and then open them in a separate program. And then Mosaic came along and changed everything, mostly for the better.

But this isn’t really meant to be a paean to the Internet, just a preamble to explain that, over the years, I’ve put a lot of content out on there on the Internet, much of which has disappeared in the ever-shifting landscape. Because I never throw anything away, I thought it might be fun to dig into my personal archives from time to time and throw whatever I’ve found up here. It’s an adventure, of sorts, looking back, trying to see how much I’ve changed, how much has stayed the same.

For instance, in the late 90s, I seriously explored the idea of setting myself up as a web designer. Remember that the Web was still a wild frontier back then, and anyone who could sling HTML and Javascript, and could figure out how to make a decent button gif that only took a couple seconds to download had a good shot of pulling in some cash. I even went so far as to make some free pages for writer friends of mine, by way of establishing a portfolio for myself.

Part of my campaign to set myself up as a web designer was to create a free graphics site. Web graphics had a very different look and feel to them then most do today. Everyone was sort of going crazy with Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro, just seeing what they could do. Everything was extravagant, unrestrained…often just plain tacky. The style I liked best was ornate and bejeweled, done so well they almost looked like someone laid a piece of jewelry across your screen.

My own gimmick was stained class. At my site Cut Glass Designs, I offered up theme sets, buttons, bars, backgrounds, the whole shebang, under the moniker “Anastasia” (I don’t remember why I used a pseudonym, but everyone seemed to be doing it). Everything had a sort of stained glass look, naturally. I started at first with Photoshop’s stained glass filter, plied over gradients and lens flair effects in order to create the feel of light coming through. My work improved radically when I put together a technique that used photos of actual stained glass samples and patterns.

The pieces displayed here are what I considered my “gallery” work: large-sized originals that I would shrink down for background borders and so forth. I don’t know how much credit I can take for the work, since all I did was put together beautiful things that other people had made. But they are pretty, and I’m glad to have a chance to dust them off and hang them up for a new audience.

Somewhere along the line, I realized that web design and graphic design were changing so rapidly that the learning curve as a designer would be huge and constant. I didn’t want to commit all my time to just keeping abreast of new technologies, because I knew it would detract from my writing. Web design might be fun and all, but writing was where my heart lay. Of course I never stopped playing with graphics and web design. I still maintain my own web site myself, and my proficiency with Photoshop has grown by leaps and bounds (though I’m still no expert, by any measure). But there’s a difference between doing something for a living, and just doing it for fun.

I still struggle with the balance between visual art and writing though. I want both in my life, but I often feel that I’m indulging one at the expense of the other. Where does the path between them lie?