Written on February 23rd, 2010 by Brendan

Welcome to the blog of Magis Creative

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This posting is not so much a blog entry as an introduction. When we decided we wanted to include a blog in our portfolio, we knew that it was going to be broad, sometimes wacky and sometimes rambling. The reason we wanted to go beyond the portfolio and the about us page was not to let you know what we were doing on the weekends or to let you know what’s happening in the world of web design. There’s already too much of that on the web. We know that the people who are listened to and respected are the ones who work on the edges, speculating upon new and original concepts – not the ones regurgitating old ideas and using your clicks to make money. We want to offer something of value: posts that make you think, that get your creative juices flowing and make you consider new connections between fields of thought you had always thought were completely distinct from one another.

We named ourselves Magis Creative for the precise reason that we don’t want to be known specifically as web designers; we want to develop a broad reputation for approaching life creatively. It’s the modern, western way to pigeonhole and to wrap life neatly up into discrete packages. It certainly makes living easier to look at the world and see it divided into sport, art, policeman, music, etc; everything we encounter inhabiting its distinct world, with no confusion as to where one ends and the other begins. But when you look closely, although defining our world in this way adds a level of convenience to our daily lives, it shuts us off from possibilities. It keeps one from seeing the humanity in the employee serving us, the beauty in the workings of a mundane kitchen appliance or the profound meaning of an everyday coincidence. Breaking down our socially constructed notions of the way the world works lets us see it in a new light. It allows us to work with what Zen teachers call “the beginner’s mind”, where all true creativity emanates from.

That’s why the topics covered in this blog will cover so much ground. We want to find new connections, new possibilities and the big ideas in little things. If we limited ourselves to just talking about design or ecommerce, we would be missing out on an entire world of inspiration to fuel our designs and to energize our lives. The greatest scientists and artists have often found their creativity on the fringes, in the places no one had considered to look or in the things that we thought had already been fully investigated. They took the insights they gathered with their endless curiosity and brought them into their paintings, poems and inventions and, in doing so, changed the way the world thinks. We think that’s a pretty good game plan to follow, so we’re going to try to cover as much ground as we can too. If only a tiny fraction of our investigations end up in our professional work, we think this will have been a huge success.