THE BRILLIANCE! - Better shipped than perfect!
When we first started THE BRILLIANCE! in 2005, Benjamin and I were in our early 20's, social media didn't exist yet, and we just didn't think too much about what we were doing, we just did it. There weren't any outlets for people to criticize or comment. When I was 18 and building NoPattern it was all hand coded HTML in a basic text editor, and having my work on the internet quickly and efficiently was way more important than having a "Coming soon" while I crafted the perfect site. I mean - really, I got my career started off the backs of those early sites. They may not have been the most compelling websites but they were perfect in the sense that they did what I needed them to do - show my work off. That's always the thing, right? What is "perfect"? THE BRILLIANCE! right now, in its newest form with a freshly built CMS and slightly overhauled design is perfect, to me, in the sense that its actually live and you're reading this. Is it perfect in the sense that everything that we've brainstormed and dreamt for it is a reality right now? No - but we'll get there. A little behind-the-scenes/"inside baseball" here, but we really struggled over the last year with what to do with this site. All three of us felt strongly it should come back, but how? On what platform? Wordpress? We'd already tried that, it wasn't right. At one point I got a pretty decent version of this site going on Squarespace, a small miracle when you consider THE BRILLIANCE! almost goes against the "pretty websites" that Squarespace seems constructed to produce. But still, it wasn't right. Ultimately we went back to our friend Dennis Eusebio and had him help us build a fully custom CMS because we really believed we needed the writing environment to match the final thing. Anyways - we ultimately found ourselves overthinking everything until after a while we just went with our gut and did what we should have done in the first place.
A question I get a lot as an artist is "How do you know when what you're working on is done?" And I never know how to answer besides - I just do. I can feel that nothing more will help and nothing less will be good enough, and when I feel that I know I'm good to go. And with something as fluid as a website, you have flexibility and room to grow.
An article on Virgil's recent talk at RISD touched on this whole thing succinctly: "...what students should understand is the attitude he brings to every endeavor: Just do it. "It's so simple. It's three words. It's not clever," he says, echoing the age-old Nike adage." So —here we are, live for just over a week now and happy to be here, just doing it.