While I was writing about my efforts developing branding for So Puzzled Puzzle Company, I realized (not for the first time) that how I’ve been writing about my art has been a little bit weird.
This blog has always been a little more development-centric but it’s still my personal blog, so when I want to write about non-development stuff, it goes here. That includes anything I write about graphic design projects. When I started doing more physical art a few years ago, though, I spun up an entirely different blog for that.
Why?
I might have had a different answer to that question at the time but, in retrospect, I think it was because I was afraid of failure or that my art wasn’t any good – no matter how much I said I didn’t care about that. So I started “No Brush No Problem” to to keep it from cluttering this space.
I don’t agree with that anymore. I’m still not sure I would call the art any good but it doesn’t matter; I learned from it and those lessons fit the ideas of iteration I often write about here in a development context. Additionally, why would it make sense to split my digital art from my physical art?
So I’ve shuttered the “No Brush No Problem” blog and imported all of that content here. I’ve tagged it all with the “art” tag and applied that tag to all of my graphic design projects.
One interesting effect of having tried to distance myself from my art is that, unlike almost every other logo project I’ve done lately, I never wrote anything up about the branding for the now-disbanded blog. So here’s a bit on that…
When I first started playing around with abstract art, I was calling it my “Power Tools Art Project.” This is because most of my initial pieces were made using a drill to fling paint onto a canvas. So when I decided to start writing about it, I registered a domain and an Instagram handle related to that.
And then, as often happens to me for some reason, the Instagram account got banned. I don’t think I’d even posted yet. I’ve had something like four different IG accounts get banned. I have no idea what I do to incur their wrath… Whatever.
So I needed a different handle and “No Brush No Problem” came to mind. Apparently that’s a trend in makeup or something but I didn’t know that at the time and it seemed appropriate. So I registered another domain (actually two because I went with a .art as the primary) and another IG handle (which I managed to keep, this time) and got the blog set up.
It seemed pretty obvious that a logo should be the “no” sign over a paintbrush so I went with that.
After most of a year that version of the logo started to feel a little plain to me. Flat. I still liked the concept but I felt that it could be executed better. So I reworked the brush to be a little sleeker and the “no” symbol to look painted and switched the font to something with a little more “scrawl” to it.
This version of the logo had the added benefit of working better in monochrome, so it made for a good watermark.
