After my attendence of the blogging meetups yesterday, it has become abundantly apparent that I need to produce a business card sot hat I can share my identity with people in the real world. Unfortunately, I’m not exactly sure what sort of identity I want to portray.

It has been a long time since I have used the Midnight Circus domain for anything. And if you’ve received email from me, you might wonder why it comes from Midnight Circus and not Asymptomatic. The history is long and complicated - well, ok, not so much.

Back when I started on the web, I was creating a resource page for the White Wolf role-playing game, Vampire: The Masquerade. If you know me really well (most people who visit the site don’t know too much about my real-life work, which is a very strange phenomenon to me and worthy of a post all on its own) then you know that I have worked with some folks at White Wolf for various reasons, and have actually been given a small credit in a poorly received supplement. Nonetheless, the tabletop gaming industry was a significant part of my life at the time.

Since Midnight Circus was created as a dedicated role-playing resource, I wanted a site to write about things that were unrelated to that topic. Out of that need, Asymptomatic evolved and become what it is today. The Midnight Circus web site has long since been taken offline, as my disenchantment with White Wolf and their products grew, but I have been using the domain for my email for so long that I couldn’t change it now - it’s part of my online identity.

As my online endeavors expanded, I’ve created a couple more sites. Particularly well known these days is Red Alt, which is a blog software resource site on which I host a good bit of my open source work. And through my work at Red Alt, I was able to jockey a position with Shimmer Studio, where my freelance work is brokered.

So the question for me becomes, What identity am I trying to portray? Do I want people to see my personal site, or my professional sites? Which of those should they see? Or should I create a whole new brand under Midnight Circus (an idea I had been toying with for a long while but never actually completed) to work from?

Working from Midnight Circus provides the easiest entry into graphic design. Because the name can evoke such a sense of mystery and wonder, the images I could use for it don’t need to be associated with computers at all. After all, when you think of the classic semiotic character, the Marlboro Man, you don’t see him handing you a pack of cigarettes and saying, “Smoke this, it’s great!” What you do see is a cowboy on the range, and it evokes a certain feeling in you that Marlboro is trying to get you to associate with their cigarettes. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to associate a “midnight circus” flare with what web design I do?

This is the primary problem I have with Shimmer Studio, by and by. I’ve never said anything to my cohorts there about it, because I have no room to complain. But in my heart, the word “shimmer” is not one I would personally choose to promote myself. Sure it’s just a name, and my work is going to be as high of a quality there as it would under any other name, but I find it difficult to put money behind an identity (read “buy business cards with that design”) that evokes images in me of sequins and disco balls. As Podz and I have tried to tell Jenn, it’s not very manly. (Fortunately, Podz and I are man enough that sequins don’t fully overwhelm our corporate testosterone level.)

Asymptomatic itself is pretty tough to brand. Is there a thing that I could show you that would make you think of Asymptomatic? Apart from the site itself? There really isn’t a signature icon here. I tried to get somehing like that from Becca when I asked her to design the site a couple of years ago, and although her design was very nice, it didn’t provide that essential bit of iconogrphy.

Red Alt would probably be the easiest of my sites for which to produce stationery. I have fairly good iconography there (although I’ve been told in the past that I should have farmed that out instead of doing it myself, I rather like what I was able to produce on my own) that I could make into a bigger logo for a business card. It’s nearly perfect. Plus, it has the added benefit of being a brand that people could identify with. The only problem with Red Alt, of course, is in complete disorder, since it was never really properly organized to be visited by people in the first place. This shouldn’t diminish the fact that I should probably do something about that.

And those are just the high-profile projects that I currently work on. When Almost Friday becomes a worldwide entertainment phenomenon, I might rather have associated my identity to that. Or perhaps when Stonepath becomes the standard for simple web-based project management, I’d prefer that in my identity. And while nothing says I couldn’t change it if those great things actually happened (which are things that I would like to happen, but demand a lot of me to bring to fruition, and as a result seem less likely than, you know, frying my spleen for breakfast), I still think I would prefer a strong brand right now that I could successfully carry over into any project I do.

I would like to overhear: “Hey, have you seen that Stonepath thing?” “No, what is it?” “It’s a project management package by that guy from XXXX.” “Oh, yeah, I’ve heard of XXXX. Cool.”

Should I be worried that I don’t even know what identity I would like to put forward in this regard?

Berta was suggesting that I use the little monkey that I use for my gravatar. I use it in a few places, but only really because I never had an identity that I wanted to promote. I would like to replace the monkey with something more meaningful; something that is not a picture of my head, which won’t give you any impression beyond, “Who’s this dude?”

As usual, I’m taking suggestions, because I simply don’t know anything. Maybe a trip to the book store is in order.