Trace Meek - 2023 Selfie with Onion

About Trace Meek

Greetings! I’m Trace Meek, a designer, artist, photographer, writer, musician, armchair philosopher, shadetree mechanic, and aspiring filmmaker based in Massachusetts. Whatever medium I work in, I enjoy the interplay of the heart, the mind, and the hands. I love to search for meaning, develop ideas, and express them in visual, tactile, and intellectual form.

Originally from Atlanta Georgia, I attended Georgia Tech and studied electrical engineering for a year and a half. Then I took some time off to work in restaurants, play in rock bands, and focus on the arts and humanities.

In the late 1980s, intrigued by New England’s gothic mystique, literary culture, and music scene, I migrated to the beautiful Pioneer Valley of Western Massachusetts.

After working as a farmhand for a few years to establish residency and gain life experience, I put myself through art school at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst (BFA cum laude, 1995). When the internet came along, I saw a creative opportunity and ventured into a career in web design.

Currently I work as a web designer, photographer, and videographer for a nonprofit company in the energy industry. When I’m not busy engineering websites, graphics, and videos, I enjoy ice skating, cooking, taking photos, playing music, reading, and puttering around in my art studio.

My life’s work consists in exploring the relationship between my technical, engineering-related aptitudes and my emotive, art-related interests.

You can find me elsewhere on the web on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, and the Figments.

About this website

This website has been online since 2001. The publishing engine is WordPress, a delightful piece of software. The design is a homemade theme that I coded by hand in my spare time during the pandemic of 2020.

This site is a labor of love—a commerce of ideas. I view it as an art project. I deliberately reduce complexity where possible, forgoing unnecessary branding, search forms, intrusive pop-up windows, social sharing icons, widgets, gadgets, and gizmos.

I want this site to question what a website should be, two decades into the twenty-first century. I conceive of every page as a self-contained essay or meditation that puts writing and imagery first, and invites the reader to be present with the content. I want this site to be like a finely-crafted book, magazine, or journal, not a mass-produced technological system. What’s old can be new again.

I respect and appreciate your attention. I don’t show you ads, I don’t nag you to sign up for a newsletter, and I don’t ask for any payment to access the content here. Hopefully I’ve succeeded in creating a quiet place on the web—far from the madding crowd—where you might enjoy a moment of refuge. If you enjoy my work and want to share it online, feel free to do so, but I humbly request attribution and a link back to the source page on this website.

Enjoy your visit, and thank you!

—Trace Meek