Greek Gods and Design Studios

So I've a special treat for those who follow my personal work. As a graphic designer, I've gone under the domain name of secondseraph.com for a few years now. It used to be a personal site, but later transformed into a professional portfolio site as I started shopping myself around as a graphic and web designer.

As my skills and portfolio has improved, however, I've grown steadily uncomfortable with the name "SecondSeraph". It was originally a biblical reference to Isaiah's vision of the seraphim, and I had made up the name as an AOL screen name when I was thirteen. As I grew, the name grew with me, and basically become my second identity.

Well, not very designer-ish, is it? These have been my thoughts lately. As I've grow as a graphic designer, I've thought about rebranding myself more as a one-man design studio, rather than a simple freelancer (mostly because I can provide clients with a full package of print, multimedia, and web). Though I'm not quite at that stage, I am close to it. This past weekend, I felt it was necessary to make the switch.

So, in the coming month, I will be getting a completely new domain name to host my professional work. I will also be separating the art website from secondseraph to its own domain, and either get rid of secondseraph altogether or reappropriate secondseraph back to what it originally was—a personal site with a flavor of experimental webdesign, like so many other cool and crazy interactive web projects out there.

I'm pretty excited about the new professional site though. I spent almost a whole day this past weekend working on it. It's not finished yet, but I can promise you it will be a next step upward, as my redesigns tend to be. Here's a sneak peak of what you can expect:



I've always been a fan of naming things after Greek gods, and recently I took a liking to Proteus—one of the early, primordial gods of the sea. He is noteworthy for being a shapeshifter that could tell the future—if anyone could capture Proteus, the "Old Man of the Sea", he would tell them the future—after he had tried turning into anything from from a serpent, to a lion, to a tree, to water itself. It's where we get the word "protean," connoting flexibility and adaptability.

Probably a good name for a design studio, mm?

Anyway, that's the progress on so far. Look forward to more updates regarding "Proteus Creative" and where it will be heading. I'll be using a new CMS I recently discovered to create the engine the site runs on, instead of head-on XHTML/CSS programming (as much as I am a fan of it, sites are more and more run on engines now rather than individually coded webpages).

Feel free to tell me if I'm out to lunch on the logo. ;) Typically it would be aligned to the right side, but this is a screenshot of the new site, so the P symbol is centered at the top. Hence why the text is justified to the left.