When I was laid off from a financial company as the pandemic was winding down, I was left at an age when I was too young to retire but too old for people to take me seriously. So, I created a brand that would promote some of the marketable skills that I had developed in my decade with my former employer. However, I began to discover that it was too conservative and was more like an office brand instead of a creative brand. So, I rebranded.
When I created the eLuevano Design Company, I moved away from promoting fewer office skills and more creative design skills. As I began connecting with others on social and networking with other creatives and small businesses, I began leaning towards the photographic side of my creativity as engagement was higher with that type of content. In addition, promoting small businesses has become important to me since the pandemic and my photography was a way of promoting them in addition to networking.
The hope for the new brand, eLuevano Design Company, was that as I began to create content, showcasing my skills in design and photography, it would also provide ways to increase business. But that has not proven to be the case. As I continued to create content, the return on the investment of my time in social and networking was small. I began to find my creative energy waning as my work on my social platform was not producing any new business.
Over the last year and a half, I also began to learn generative AI imagery. Settling on Midjourney, I learned how to design and experiment with Midjourney prompts to create images. Most of my time with Midjourney has been used to develop ways of creating unique images from what I was seeing. I did research on art in different periods, different art genres, and epochs throughout history, as well as artists from the early 20th century and before. I applied that to modern subjects and found some success in creating artistic imagery. But I also decided that I could apply Midjourney to content for design layout examples, which was the original intent for Midjourney.
As AI began to push into real-world applications, the controversy of AI created some strong feelings and polarization towards the subject. Many of my photographer followers were turned off by my introduction of AI imagery into my content. As many were moving towards analog, in particular film, to create imagery, I was going in the opposite direction. Leave it to me to be different. So, I created a separate brand to showcase my AI art.
With the changes in the political and social environment over the last decade, I also found that I needed an outlet to express my personal feelings about what was happening around me and my thoughts on my art. With no platform for that expression, I found that my feelings would clumsily crash into my creative brand. So, I decided to create another separate brand for deeper self-expression.
After the 2024 election, I began to view the world differently than what I had believed it to be. That led me to re-evaluate my social platforms. I realized that I had fractured my expression into different pieces (i.e. brands). There was a piece of me here, a piece of me there, and over there. I also found it difficult to juggle all the brands. So, since I finally admitted that the creative brand, eLuevano Design Company, was not as successful as I had hoped, my priorities changed.
I had decided that the main goal of my brand should not be to only focus on my creativity and promoting my creative business, but also on my life and self-expression. I would no longer look to build followers but to express myself in every part of my life, and those that wished to stick around for that, could do so. The new brand would be a cathartic expression of my creativity and my life.
Enter EyeCreate – a brand to represent me, every part of me. Life and Creativity.