I will be attending my first SGCI conference next month, which is being held in New Orleans this year. New Orleans! I can't wait. I've got all sorts of "professional" prep to do before then, and I'm working down the list, slowly but surely.I ordered business cards from Moo.com last night, and should be receiving those in the next couple of weeks. I chose Moo because they have a really simple WYSIWYG design interface and you can have multiple designs in each card park, which allowed me to feature many of my favorite pieces. Despite the site's simplicity, it took me FIVE hours to design my cards. Why? When humans are provided with too many choices, they have to act against the fear of making the WRONG choice, many times over. Haha. This has been researched and proven (see this article for a quick rundown of the theory of "decision fatigue").
On a related note, while choosing artwork for the business cards, I noticed that the majority of the pieces I've made ask my audience to think about why we're here, to which my answer has consistently been "just because." One of my flaws as an artist, in my opinion, is that I spend too much time planning my pieces, racking my brain for the best way to convey a specific theme. Free will and existentialist ideas rate high on the list of conversation topics I hope to promote with my art, and it was reassuring to see a natural connection between so many pieces I had previously thought of as being unrelated. In reality, it was their style that was unrelated, not their message.
As an homage to this happy self-discovery, I used the back of my business card as an opportunity to mock my own fleeting existence, by listing my name "obituary style" (learned during my years working at a newspaper, when I spent many evenings writing obits for local funeral homes and families). Beneath my name, I included my birth year, followed by two little letters that spell out something big about my own beliefs: "c.e." Will anyone get the joke? We'll see.
And I nearly forgot! Prior to the business card design, I got
myself one of those new-fangled QR codes to connect to a small mobile site I built yesterday. The site has a few pieces of my recent work, contact info, and links to this site and my Tumblr - all accessible from the smart phone of the person holding my card. It was super easy: (1) Get your free QR code here, (2) make sure you save a version that's at least 500 x 500 px, and (3) upload it as artwork for your new card. Bam.Next on my SGC to-do list is to update this website. I need nice photos of some newer pieces and a better gallery configuration. That's next week's challenge, though. Any ideas? Let me know.
