My Web Art Garden

Shedding the skin of owning an agency

This was the first iteration (circa Fall 2024) of my own online presence, pretty-much-post Marstin, the web agency my darling partner and I founded in 2018.

While working as the “creative director” for web clients in this business doing content, strategy, and design, I had continually run into this sticky conception that the digital world is scary, cold, or unnatural (more so than the “real world” at least – whatever that means?).

I understand the worldview and life experiences that can underpin this opinion, but it’s not one I’ve ever really held myself, and personally I thought it needed a little debunking.

Streamline and expand

My Web Art Garden was an attempt to streamline my web work and project process while expanding into sharing my own ideas and even… art! 😱

Illustrations

I published some of my first “made by hand” illustrations using Procreate (and by that I mean I traced over compositions I collaged together using scraps of existing images, and then added texture, patterns and color – I did NOT trust myself to draw anything from scratch with my own fingers at this point! 🥲). Most of them are down below.

Originally, I had developed a whole productized catalog of web-related services, complete with variations, scalable pricing, and detailed forms for purchase. I had also devised a subscriber strategy that felt delightful: My Web Art Garden had a gate, and there were various types of keys one could hold that offered different levels of access to content, products, etc. It all started with a little “post pollination.”

Essays

I wrote essays describing some of the personal philosophies and approaches to remote work, creative development, and project collaboration I had collected over the years of running a web agency.

I worked on this for a few months and through the process realized I did not, in fact, want to spend any time marketing web services (which had been true all along even when running my agency) and I wanted to develop income streams based solely around my own ideas and designs.

Epilogue

So I took the whole thing down and started over from there. But it was cute, right? The essays above (Text and Email as a Meditative Practice, Social Ties, Remote Work and Creative Resilience, Can We Make Peace with Creative Resistance? and The Magic of Written Communication) as well as some shorter notes have all migrated to this site… which is why the tone might sound a bit more professional or formal than some of the other writing 😉

The Compost and the Concept

What I love about what grew in My Web Art Garden was the playful “handmade” branding, a new public-facing confidence in my perso-professional writing voice, and taking baby steps towards creating my own illustrations. And I love that I could let it go, learning so much in the process of making it, and eventually making room for a bigger vision of what could be possible for my illustrations, ideas, and impact.

Since the building and composting of My Web Art Garden, it’s been nearly two years of testing different concepts in an attempt to develop consistent income streams from sources other than web projects. And since I am still mainly making an income as a footloose-and-fancy-freelancer, it makes me chuckle to look back on this carefully tended blossom that only lived a short while, when in some ways it might have been just as well to let it keep growing 😆 (but let’s be real, I am glad I let it die 👹).

Sometimes we have an exact vision of what we think something should look like, but then when we go to make it, we find out that’s actually not right at all… and what a WONDERFUL thing to discover, right? Sometimes we can change the scaffolding around the thing we are growing, just ever-so-slightly, and that mini course correction puts us exactly back on track. Other times it’s better to scrap it altogether, then let whatever is still alive grow back fresh. Either way, we should never underestimate The Importance of Compost.

And no matter what, I think the most important thing is to remember to enjoy every step of the messy, adorable process of discovery that is creation and life itself. I still like my illustrations, I am still proud of my essays, and I am still here enjoying what I made… and I hope you might enjoy them too. And thus, I share this concept: My Web Art Garden!!! And some of the fruits it bore 🍐

This website was a new expression of a web I was already weaving – an intricate lace of creativity and strategy, the “natural” and the digital. And it’s a web I continue to weave into current projects and creations. Whatever My Web Art Garden died to create is still becoming… but I think the roots are good 🌱