Designs

I thought about just getting a new domain name, but than I had a few thoughts.

First, I might have a very few viewers (I never had that many visitors to my site, but a few), and they might remember the name and so, part nostalgia and part keeping those past visitors.

Second, the word “design” is not only what you mostly think nowadays, when you hear that word. I guess mostly when you hear it as german speaker, because in german design means mostly kind of “drawn artsy creations” (in a very loose translation), like the artsy design of a car, or a logo. Whereas in english “design” means a lot more. You might look it up yourself, but what I might mean most in keeping it, is the “intention and purpose” of this site, the “planing” meaning is also neat and I will always like “art and creation”.

Not all of you might ask yourself, what “Ber” of “Ber-Design” means. But I guess not all of you do, and whoever is interested might investigate here. It probably is a little boring to most, though.

My name ist actually Bernd. I don’t like the sound of that (being artsy again), so I changed it at some point in time. Most people in my life now only know me as Bernie. Doesn’t explain “Ber” yet, but I wanted to say that, so do not call me Bernd please – that sounds so earnest.

While I was finding my way as a young artist I started to sign all my pictures, just because (and, well, you usually had to write your name on your piece in schools art class anyway). As I mentioned I didn’t like “Bernd” so I tried a few ways to sign it in a way I like it too. Then after some playing around, to be honest, I ended up with “Bér”. Some random youthful and maybe a little teenage deranged ideas floating through my mind at the time (I was reading Illuminati at the time, which might explain a bit of it) were those: my Initials are BR, speaking it out loud in german it sounds like [Be:] and [er]. The more active minds of you might see, that this together might become [Be:er] or [Ber]. I then contracted the two e’s to é (spoken like [e:]), et voilà “Bér” was born and hence used on all my works. There are very few friends, that actually do call me that in speech, which I do like, actually.

There is also another nice coincidence that fits great, is the meaning of the name “Bernd”. It is a derivative of the longer original name Bernhard, which is an old high german composition name of Bero (bear) and harti (strong or brave) – or “strong as a bear”. So my name apparantly dropped the “strong” part, but still means bear (… maybe little bear, because of the derivation… hm.). And “Bér” is the same pronounciation as Bear (or better “Bär”) in german. I like that to be honest. That’s why sometimes I also use クマ（熊) (kuma) as nickname in games.

So, that was my long winded explanation, but whoever read this far, you know now, why that length might be necessary to explain my convolutet mind from back then.

Can I really call it career? I’d say so, since I did earn some money with it up to now. But I will not become a famous artist or a professional artist in this life, maybe the next or I was in the last.

But since I remember I drew sketches. I learned to draw and did it a lot, while I also learned writing – I mean drawing as a kid of course, but it was more than just Kindergarten sketches, I’d say. During my elementary school I got into some trouble with the teacher because I always drew in class, but since I also paid attention, she was satisfied as long as I kept paying attention. I then mostly scribled in my school notebooks until the art class became increasingly interesting and I started getting best marks and finally took art as one of my main classes in the last years of german high school education, continuing to get best marks – while my classmates sometimes barely finished one piece, me (and some others in class) handed in two finished pieces, each getting best marks.

I very seriously thought about getting into university for some design or art studies, but somehow I came to the decision, that I better learn something to earn money with, and continue art as a hobby. To be honest, I was a little too afraid, that inspiration might leave me at some point and then what? Thinking about it today, I think it would have been a good career path for me, but hindsight is always easy and I am actually not unhappy with the career I did have instead – mostly at least, since it awakened other skills I found out I am actually good at. So it just stayed as a hobby with me.

I mostly sketched my RPG characters, RPG scenes and other roleplay associated ideas for a while, even now. RPG is a great and continous source of inspiration for me. That also led to some small income for commission work for a while, sketching the characters for other players. Designing logos and homepages for clubs and a few small companies also became a thing, although not a lot of income there. And I had some ideas for T-Shirt Designs, and I run a small shop and have a continous (but very small) income there. (I will add it here sometime after curating.)

For techniques, I mostly use pencils and dabbled with copic markers for physical drawing. I do like photography but have never come around other than increasing my composition skills and using my smartphone camera to more than automatic mode. In addition my digital image “manipulation” skills became pretty good, especially manipulate Pixel Images with GIMP, create vector graphics with Inkscape or drawing digitally with SketchBook. And that is where I am now.