I just fin­ished a shot for PSST!4. The for­mat this year is slightly dif­fer­ent with each col­lab­o­ra­tor start­ing a shot and the oth­ers then fol­low­ing from that. It’ll be much more mixed-up and promises for some excit­ing combinations …

I am also NOT orga­niz­ing the project this time around, just par­tic­i­pat­ing. Nice change!

You may have noticed that there’s no more Grow Design Work. I’ve moved my port­fo­lio over here to brandoughertyjohnson.com. This was for two reasons.

One, I gen­er­ally work solo and on one project at a time. I want to stay small. There’s no plan for expan­sion, world dom­i­na­tion or enter­ing the inter­ac­tive mar­ket. No cre­ative direc­tor, art direc­tor, pro­ducer or busi­ness man­ager over here. It’s just me. When you call the office, I’ll answer. And I thought my site and iden­tity should reflect that.

Two, I want peo­ple to know and remem­ber my own name (I know, it’s a mouth­ful) not the vague band-esque sound­ing domain that I could actu­ally reg­is­ter at the time (I would’ve loved if it was just called Grow).

This is what I orig­i­nally wrote on the About sec­tion of my site, circa 2005:

Grow Design Work is the stu­dio of BDJ for the pur­pose of cre­at­ing inde­pen­dent work, doing free­lance design + ani­ma­tion, and achiev­ing gen­eral hap­pi­ness. My goal is sim­ply to do great work with under­stand­ing clients, sym­pa­thetic stu­dios and inter­ested agen­cies. I love super-graphic style, bold ani­ma­tion, cus­tom typog­ra­phy, and peo­ple with a desire to exper­i­ment and a plan for allow­ing it in their sched­ules.
I want to grow, design, and work. In that order.

I still believe all of that. 100%. None of the impe­tus for cre­at­ing my own work has changed one bit. But that was then, this is now. And now, I’d rather do it all under my own name. So good­bye, Grow Design Work. Viva Bran Dougherty-Johnson.

I am now work­ing with Peace Div­i­dend Mar­ket­place on a short film for their orga­ni­za­tion. It’s an expla­na­tion of what they do and how they work, intended to cre­ate aware­ness about their work. What they do is actu­ally fan­tas­tic, help­ing local com­pa­nies in crisis-afflicted regions build sus­tain­able, job-creating busi­nesses that will exist long after peace-keeping and human­i­tar­ian mis­sions have left.

Joel Pickard will be doing some sound design for the film and it should be done very very soon. Can’t wait!

Myla came up with a great lit­tle story the other night at din­ner. We’re going to make it a short film and I’m work­ing on illus­trat­ing the char­ac­ters now. Here’s an excerpt from her storyboard.