Hey yall! Im Griffin! I am a local Austin artist and web developer! Ive never done one of these meet the artist posts so here we go!
I was born in New Orleans and raised on the east coast. I went to Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia and had the chance to study abroad in Rome, Italy for a while during my studies. I graduated with a BFA, major painting & drawing, minors art history and glass blowing. I have also always been into emergent technologies and the web, coding since my teens. Some of my first paying web freelance gigs were designing homies Myspace music profiles. I moved to Austin in 2007 to continue my artistic/web development career. I have now worked at The University of Texas at Austin for almost 10 years as a web developer and officially formed my artistic business Griffin Insight, LLC in 2016.
I have thrived in Austin – it is here that I really have found my voice and my community. I started the Art of Austin art collective in 2010 and decided to work towards building an innovative creative community. The only goal at the time was showcasing, promoting, and connecting all of the incredible artists that I was finding here in my new home. 10 years later, I am very happy to say Art of Austin is also thriving and we have been able to showcase 38 artists to date and connected countless others for commissions, gallery shows, and mural gigs.
I am beyond blessed to still be here making artwork and continuing to do what I love. I want to give a huge shoutout to my bro Riktor for the super fresh Art of Austin jammer featured here and all of my brothers and sisters and extended artfam that have supported me and the community as a whole, together we are so much stronger, especially in times like these. I love you all, thanks for taking the time to read this! Stay strong and keep creating!
Listen to the Eavesdroppers new album!
I am currently 1/2 of the Austin based group Eavesdroppers. We dropped our debut album, Avenue, late 2019 – give it a listen! Were working on a new SP, follow us on Instagram to keep updated!
My work was in Austin City Hall for a year!
Peoples Gallery @ City Hall – 2019
So honored to have been selected to be in the annual Peoples Gallery show at City Hall! I really feel like this is a true milestone for my artistic career and proof that if you just keep making work it will pay off. The opening was this weekend and had over 1300 attendees and I had the opportunity to talk to some of the council members in my district.
I was stunned to see how much art was not only in the show, but in City Halls permanent collection and throughout all of the offices. Austin truly values the arts! If you didn’t make it to the opening its okay, it will be up all year and there is even a virtual tour that you can take that is really cool – check it out!
Website rebuild is here!
Griffin Insight, LLC – est. 2018
I have always been into emerging technology. As a child of the Gen X generation, I have a very unique view on the advancement of computers and the rise of the Internet. I got my first computer when I was around 8. I present the Radio Shack TRS-80.
Radio Shack TRS-80
Yeah. It didn’t have a screen. You had to connect it to a TV via twin lead connectors. Those looked like this. TVs back then had screws on the back to connect antenneas and such. It’s pretty funny to think about now.
Twin lead connector – circa 1986
I couldn’t do much with it, mostly code in Basic and play games like Clowns and Balloons. Computers have obviously come a long way since then. Now we’re basically all cyborgs attached to our phones.
I got into web design back in the Myspace days. Kids would pay me to customize their music profiles – it was pretty lucrative actually. I really enjoyed learning to code and I wanted a website for my art and other creative endeavors. So I started teaching myself and officially launched my first website in 2006. If you wanted to see my first website you can actually find it here – I’ve kept it up all this time! No judgement, it was my first!
Like computers, I have also came a long way since that first site. I freelanced making logos and websites for food trucks for a few years when I first moved to Austin in 2007. I went back to school at ACC and rounded out my web dev skills with a webmaster certification. I eventaully landed a web gig at the University of Texas at Austin and I am there to this day. I actually built our departmental website, take a look!
I occasionally assist small businesses with web consultation so if you are in need feel free to contact me. I also occasionally freelance branding and web development but since it is my day job, I like to spend the majority of my free time painting.
Getting a little into the technical side of things as far as how I built this site – I spent many years making custom child themes for WordPress, which back in the day, was pretty buggy. There was lots of hacking PHP and half working plugins written by questionable authors. I eventually graduated to Drupal development a couple of years ago and I vowed to never touch WordPress again.
Drupal is king of CMSs
I last redesigned my site in 2015 using WordPress and I like to update it every three or so years. I had planned on bulding it on Drupal 8 and being super cutting edge. It turns out, I was a little too ahead of the curve. With Drupal 8 being so new (official release late 2015), no one has written a tested e-commerce module for it. I wasn’t about to undertake that task from scratch.
So in further research I looked at all the pay options like Squarespace, Big Commerce, or Shopify. They all looked okay but I didn’t want yet another monthly cost – I already pay for web hosting at Bluehost and as a seasoned web developer, I couldn’t justify not just doing it myself. Without a viable Drupal option I reluctantly resorted to WordPress and decided to try it again – it had been a few years since I had developed on it.
Turns out that WordPress, now at version 5, has improved tremendiously! Using the Genesis Framework (which I highly recommend) as my parent theme and using the Woocommerce plugin for the e-commerce solution, I have somewhat effortlessly put this site together. No hacking!
Wordpress has redeemed itself in my book and here we are! If you don’t know what any of what I wrote means and have interest in learning more, I am going to be hosting a web workshop for artists coming up soon. Contact me if you would like to know more!
Thanks for visiting!
“Creating a neural lace is the thing that really matters for humanity to achieve symbiosis with machines.” – Elon Musk