It’s been a trying year in many ways … probably the most unsatisfactory year in more than a decade. Certainly from where I’m sitting. But not all has been bad.

Logos

This year I’ve had the pleasure of working with some amazingly talented people – creating some pretty cool logos for some pretty neat artists and bands such as Vathr, who will put out an EP sometime early next year, Fleshbound, which features members from Lord Belial, and Pandemonial, a band that promises to take black metal back to its origins.

But that’s business as usual.

Perhaps more interestingly, I also had the honor of co-authoring a paper on metal logos, which was accepted by and presented at the alt.VIS workshop at IEEE VIS, the premier forum for visualization research and technology.

This led me to doing a logo for Everything Hertz, a science podcast.

Illustrations

Next year I plan to focus mostly on illustrative work, be it working on my own projects or for others. At least two things come to mind here.

First, especially, I plan on working on a comic. Two comics, actually. One science-fiction, the other an action humor story.

Secondly, me and a friend have been talking about starting a little print-on-demand venture as a thing on the side. To that end I will be doing some stylish illustrations.

Discoveries

Though I’ve mostly listened to older, familiar music, I’ve discovered new artists. A few deserve a special mention here (and no, I’m not being sponsored). Dødsengel, Light Field Reverie, and Mephorash are some of the bands that I listen to on a daily basis. None of these has released an album this year, however; of those that did, the ones that have impressed me the most are 1914, Emptiness, Helheim, Necronautical, and Tribulation.