this now 

Designer. Creative. Artist. 

I've never liked any of these descriptions.
When I was at College, training to be a designer I always seemed to be trying to find ways to subvert the brief to do something more emotional and expressive than was required.

Around 2000, I had just returned to Scotland after a couple of years living in the U.S. During that time I had picked up the skills to build websites and had started to figure out how to apply my skills to this new digital form. At that point, there wasn't many designers around who had those skills and I quickly got offered a job. And the jobs kept coming. I can't ever look at the jobs I had with any regret. They allowed me to buy a flat, raise a family and have alot of fun along the way. But there was many compromises to be made. In that short window between getting back to Scotland and getting a job, I had started to define what my personal approach to art and design in the online era would be. The projects you see on this site are the extension of that personal approach.

It is my belief that the early 2000s were a golden age of design and creatvity, much like the early decades of the 20th century are to photography. A new suite of software allowed visual designers to create (very bad) code and share that work online. In that era, no standards had been fixed. Interfaces and interactive content were open for experimentation. Designers like Josha Davis at Praystation merged maths and art into a brave new world where anything seemed possible. When Macromedia Flash landed, I finally found a medium that allowed me to visualise the kind of content I imagined. I poured untold thousands of hours into that medium. Every evening was spent in front of my orange see-through iMac. I rarely published the work. I simply did it for the love of of seeing what unfolded in front of me when I tweaked a variable. One thing I was sure of was that the technology available to most people lacked the refinement and power to display the kind of content I felt the online medium was capable of.

It's nearly 20 years since those days. Standards have become compliant. Flash has become redundant. Vast social networks swallow 99% of all the time users spend online. In every pocket is a device of staggering beauty and capability that is connected at every second to everything else. My children reach for their devices as a way of understanding the world. They seek reassurance, community and human contact in that space.

At this moment, I feel as enraptured by the possibilities of human creativity as I did in the elementary years of the millenium. It's from this point that I have felt able to bring some of my work into view and draw a golden thread between these days and those.
Peace.

Jonathan Gould