For the past few days I’ve been work­ing dili­gently on a brand spank­ing new design for this site, as the cur­rent design has always been meant as a tem­po­rary place­holder. When I say brand spank­ing, I mean it, as it will include pre­vi­ous ele­ments I’ve used in other site incar­na­tions (mainly heaps of beige) and for the first time in this site’s his­tory there will be an “art­work” sec­tion. (Oooh.)

One of the main rea­sons for this realign­ment “re-envisioning” is that I’d like to tie the blog together with my other domain, eriksagen.com which includes a work­ing port­fo­lio and a resume for the time being. Even­tu­ally there will be a slick com­pany site in place of what’s there now, but that’s far off a bit.

Brand­ing is cru­cial to me at this point and has worked well for other peo­ple, like Jon Hicks, Veerle Pieters, Dan Ceder­holm (and Mike David­son) to name a few. There’s an instant famil­iar­ity and con­nec­tion when you visit these sites and that’s inten­tional, so bring­ing every­thing under one roof (albeit a some­times leaky one) is impor­tant to me.

Back to my men­tion­ing an art­work sec­tion, I’ve decided to beef up my port­fo­lio. Over the years it’s become, well, a bit stag­nant due to other pri­or­i­ties and dis­trac­tions tak­ing focus. How­ever, shov­ing all that aside briefly, I’ll be putting up art­work from the past, present and future, which will be the present by the time I hang them up in a dig­i­tal gallery.

Many thanks to the hand­ful of sup­port­ers over the past few months (even you, Anton) for encour­ag­ing me to do this, espe­cially since I adver­tise that I’m an illus­tra­tor and yet have very lit­tle to show for it. Who would’ve thunk?

In a nut­shell, things will be chang­ing for the bet­ter around these parts.

That’s all folks! 

It’s hard to describe the jour­ney from New York to Austin, TX, mainly because it wasn’t quite how I imag­ined it would be. In my mind, I would’ve boarded the plane on time, with a few min­utes to spare. I would’ve landed at the Austin Inter­na­tional Air­port, grabbed my cobalt blue duf­fle bag, rented the car I had made a reser­va­tion for and drove to my hotel with­out get­ting lost.

You might have guessed where this is going, but, it was unde­ni­ably more com­pli­cated than what I just described. Rather, my flight was an hour delayed, my lug­gage went miss­ing for close to 2 hours and well, I got lost. Despite look­ing over the maps and con­vinc­ing myself that I was going to go from Point A to B with­out any trou­ble or con­fu­sion, it ended it being a fran­tic trip buzzing in and out of Texas traf­fic and finally after a des­per­ate call to the hotel I finally found the place.

The redeem­ing fac­tor in all this was going out to din­ner with Matthew Oliphant, Anton Peck, David Thomp­son (who has a slick ‘Hitchcock-esque’ logo), Will Pâté and Steve Mar­shall. Prior to com­ing out here I had only heard of (or seen the work of) Anton Peck and Will Pâté through mutual friends and col­legues. Already, I feel like I’ve made a few new friends and SXSW hasn’t even “offi­cially” started yet.