1. The Garden

I bought a house with a small, private back yard a few years after I started working at Microsoft. The yard became my sanctuary. Over my years of ownership, I transformed a barren, rock wall into a green community of living things, covered with periwinkle and sedums and assorted other crevice-loving micro flora: scraping, digging, planting, nourishing, watering, experimenting. And waiting: to see what would grow and what wouldn't. It was an exercise of extreme patience, but with rich, albeit immaterial, rewards. I built raised garden beds, and planted flowers and edible herbs. I began cooking with the fresh herbs, and I discovered a kind of existential fulfillment in this handgrown vertical supply chain.

• Photos

I don't consider myself a photographer. My design degree included some photography, but it involved film and chemicals and dark rooms. It was slow and messy. Eventually I bought my first digital camera, a $100 General Electric point-and-shoot from Sears, but I still didn't have a use for it.

Something about my back-yard garden inspired me. I noticed a change in my state of mind when I was there. I would see certain arrangements of light and shadow, or form and pattern, and felt compelled to capture them. I wonder if it was the patterns, or the state of mind I sought, or both?

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I discovered that my cheap point-and-shoot camera made terrific images. There was no fussing, no mussing, no waiting; just seeing, pointing, clicking, and uploading. And they were virtually free: take as many as you want and your camera has memory to hold. Throw away the bad ones and share the good ones. I kind of fell in love. The pictures tell the story.

• Photo Book

I wanted to do something with my back yard photos. It was my first experience with digital photography and I was inspired by the fluidity and immediacy of the process. Also, I didn't have any projects using InDesign, one of the apps in my Creative Cloud subscription. Other than that, I don't remember why I decided to design this book.

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The design/work flow of taking my own photos, downloading them, and being able to directly edit them in a layout app was new to me. I apologize for using lorem ipsum, but it wasn't a writing project at the time. Now that I'm writing for this site, though, I feel like I might have something to say that would work well in this book design.

• Icons

I designed a small set of garden icons around that same time. I don't think the icons were related to the book. I just wanted to stay in practice, decided to design some icons, and gardening was on my mind.

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I did these in Illustrator using only a mouse as an input device, which is pretty challenging. I write more here about drawing on a computer and my insecurity with sketching before I got my first wacom tablet and smartphone.

• Site

I worked on some assets for a hypothetical garden website without really having a plan for a site. Still, I think there are some fun visual concepts there when I look back at it.

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Much of it feels kind of embarrassing to me now. Oh well, I'm sure I must have grown from it. Get it? Grown? (Or should it be groan? :) )

• Outcome

This was a long time ago, but in many ways it feels like just last year. I think this "project" is about how I recovered my creative mojo and healed my soul after seven years working on battleship-gray Office productivity tools.