Ada Lovelace Day

So, for Ada Lovelace Day, I am going to write about an unsung tech heroine close to my heart, my wife, erin.  erin is my biggest source of artistic inspiration.  she is an incredible visual artist (just check out erin’s sketchbook), and had to make quite an adjustment to adapt to web technology like we were committed to do to start thinktank/arcane palette.  out of that, though, she’s said that she likes it better that she didn’t start out knowing all the rules because it means that she has less built-in inhibitions.  she inspires me to put colors together in ways i would not have considered before.  we work well as a team because our skillsets really compliment each other’s and we can learn from and build off each other.

erin really started her artist’s journey in high school.  at that point she was mostly doing sketches, pen, and photography.  in college, her interests broadened to lithography, printmaking, and mixed media, all the while infused by her acute observations of interpersonal relationships and her academic studies in gender issues.  she presented a breathtaking collection at her senior art show, which focussed on personal themes of the relationships between people and between themselves and their bodies.  it was really then that i realized how talented she was.

since then, she’s adapted her art to the digital world, while still retaining a hand-made feel.  i feel like it is her passion for artisan craftsmanship that really helps to keep us focussed on what we do as a business, the image we want to present and maintain, and our overall artistic style.  too often the web is populated by clean lines and boxes, and not enough are we able to step out of the symetrical computer world and see something organic, fluid, and human on our computer monitors.  erin’s work pushes me to move outside my comfort zone of the traditional web design i’ve been looking at and making for the past 10 years and create works of art that infuse chaos and randomness in a beautiful and real way that steps out of the mold of traditional web design (this site’s theme is largely inspired by designs that she built originally).

graphic design is largely a man’s industry — when she bought for me Mr. Retro‘s Permanent Press Photoshop filter for my birthday and had to email them for a question, they assumed her name was Eric even though it said erin both in the email and in the from line, and made this mistake more than once.  so it’s awesome to see that gender line being broken, and even more so when she is forging a new path in the field against the grain of traditional norms.

here are a few of the sites she’s designed:

arcane palette 
maverick mom 
do you know the catering man? 
kidsblog 
fly me to the moon theme (formerly the thinktank studio site design, also used on the current thinktank site (sort of) and at the thinktank zazzle store)