Arcane Palette Creative Design » artistic graphic design

When we first started doing website design about a year and a half ago, I was still working full time doing Tier 2 escallation technical support on Windows servers and client PCs for a major grocery chain.  I started doing freelance contract work for a local hosting company with a large outsource design department.  When I started to see the potential to turn that into a full-time job, I quit my cushy, salaried, tech support job with good benefits to work from home, with no benefits, and took on a part-time job at Whole Foods Market.  This time, I wasn’t in a corporate office, but out on the floor, throwing freight with the Grocery team, and then later, being a bit more visual, creating displays and cutting and wrapping cheese in the Specialty department.

Between the freelance, contracted design work, building up our own design studio as ThinkTank Studio, and working at Whole Foods, Erin and I had one day off a week.  If we were lucky.  And we often worked 12 hour days.

Earlier this year, we relaunched our business as Arcane Palette Creative Design.  It was more than just a name change.  Part of the transition was a vow to do what we love doing, and to choose not to do things that we are not excited about.  One of the things this included was no longer doing outsource design work for other people — there were a lot of sites we did that we put some of our best work into, and it got branded with someone else’s name.  If we’re going to put our best work out there, we want to be able to claim it.

Now we move into a new phase.

This last weekend was my last at Whole Foods.  Now I can devote 100% of my attention and energy into Arcane Palette.  This is an exciting thing, something that just struck me suddenly last night.  It’s always been something that both of us have dreamed of to work for ourselves, doing something we love doing.  Honestly, part of me never really believed that was a real possibility.  But here we are, we’re doing it, we’re making our business succeed and not accepting failure.  Even now, with this economy, we have been able to push forward to a point in which it was no longer possible to grow further as long as I had another job.  It is liberating to sit here and know that I really am the only boss of me and that my work week is made up of design and coding for Arcane Palette.  I can’t tell you how rewarding it feels to know that we literally built this from nothing and now it’s our full-time gig.  It makes you really believe the old adage that you can do anything if you put your mind to it.

Thanks, McFly.