The WordPress Magazine

Danno works with steel and natural processes to make you look at rust from a whole new perspective.  His work is showcased on his WordPress-powered site, Steel and Snow (steelandsnow.com).  I met up with the artist and web designer for an online chat about WordPress, his art and how blogging is shaping our world.

Hi Danno, perhaps you could introduce yourself and tell us a little about your part of the world?

You bet.  I’m a bald-hippie artist with minor redneck and major nerd tendencies.  The Canadian Rocky Mountains is where I call home and my neighborhood is surrounded by mountains, lakes, forests and rivers.  A traffic jam around here is getting stuck behind a car at a stop sign and street crime is something commited by bears stealing your garbage.  The biggest town for four hours drive in any direction is about 10,000 people.

How long have you been using WordPress for?  Were you making websites before using WordPress?

Hmm let me think here…  A developer friend suggested I check out WordPress.  He was the guy who introduced me to web standards and when the need for a blogging platform came up, he recommended WordPress.  I think that was about 2004 sometime.  And yeah, I’ve been building sites since 1995 in the days of transparent spacer GIFs and nested tables were king.

Who needs WordPress when you’ve got nested tables?

Hehe, yeah, those were the glory days!

Steel and Snow is a website with a blog, rather than a traditional blog.  Was WordPress still the obvious choice?

Definitely.  Since first meeting WordPress in 2004, I was smitten with the platform itself and how vibrant the community was.  I mean the amount of hours contributed to the project by developers is astounding.  I can’t imagine what having that kind of man power is like and I’m sure the guys at Automattic stop every now and then and pinch themselves about the friendly giant they’ve created.  I’d say nine out every ten sites I’ve worked on since 2004 have rolled out on WordPress.  For me it’s not a matter of why a site should be built on WordPress, but why shouldn’t it?  And there has to be a good reason for not going WordPress.  So yeah, when the time came to get my site up for Steel and Snow, the choice really was a no-brainer.

I take it you designed the site yourself, from scratch?

Yeah, given design and development is my background it made sense for me to handle it all myself.  It’s a young site and on it’s second redesign already.

Do you always find yourself thinking, “oh, if I just change that…” or do you tend to stick with it and start over if you’re ready for a change?

Laugh.  Yeah I suffer from a serious case of tweak-itis.  I’m always trying to improve the flow and legibility of the content.  I also try to cut down on visual noise wherever possible by giving elements that cannot justify their existence the chop!  My problem is that aside from Steel and Snow I also run other websites and businesses, so finding the time to make all my own WordPress sites look and feel as I want them isn’t always possible.  To me, nothing I create is ever really complete, I just run out of time and have to draw the line somewhere.

Let’s talk about your art, it’s amazing!  How long has it taken you to learn the techniques you use?

Thanks.  About five years ago I was shown a technique for rusting steel and it floored me, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.  From there I explored further to find my own methods of corrding steel with rain and snow.  I live in the Canadian Rockies so it’s a prime spot to co-create art with whatever weather Nature sends my way.

The natural world is obviously really important to you, how well does that fit with your interests in technology?

Wow, great question.  I’m sure you’ve seen The Matrix right?  In that movie Agent Smith describes humans being like a virus, spreading from one place to the next, consuming the resources and then spreading some more.  I think that manner of existing on this planet is coming to an end.  We’re getting more savvy about the damage we are doing to the very natural systems that give us life.  We’re also taking our first earnest steps to move away from our dependence on dirty coal and dirty oil as our main sources of energy.  To come full circle and answer your question, I think that technology simply provides us all with a different kind of lens with which to view the natural world and allows us to take incremental steps towards living in balance with it.

Where do you think the current wave of social media and blogging fits in with that?

Oh man, the rise of social media and blogging can only accelerate us down a path towards true sustainability.  The rate at which we are learning and sharing information is happening at an unprecendented rate.  In ten short years, we’ve redefined the way the most of humainty seeks and shares information.  Like never before truly inspired ideas, products and concepts can now rise from obscurity and enter the mainstream (or powerfully inhabit their own niche) at incredible speeds.  If anything, the web has shown us that humans love to communicate and share information and we gravitate towards anything that is free!  If you think about that in terms of WordPress, it’s the ultimate free-information-sharing machine.

If there was just one thing you could suggest that bloggers do to help our world towards a more sustainable future, what would it be?

What I don’t see enough of - and the one thing I would encourage all bloggers to do - is to put a text link in their footers for one or two of their favorite charities.  It takes so litte time and turns a mundane legal copyright area of our blogs and websites into a place that generates some clicks for people working towards making positive change for us all.  Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders (MSF), Kiva, UNICEF, Greenpeace… anything.  Pick any charity you believe in and give them a link.  It’s an easy and excellent way to support the causes you believe in, 365 days a year.

That’s a really cool idea!  I’ve just taken a look at your links at the bottom of Steel and Snow.  Thanks for taking the time to talk, it’s been great to hear your thoughts.

You bet.  Cheers!