kriegs.net | Phirebrush

Website: Phirebrush.com
My Role: Founder. Design & Code. Editor.

Phirebrush was an online magazine that I had started back in 2001 with my friend James Acklin. Near the end of its life cycle, the site was was pushing over 1 million unique visitors and well over 6 million total page views. It still amazes me the artists we had contribute and interview that have gone on to become some of the bigger names around the scene now.

When it started off, we were tired of all the closed off, invite only digital art sites and wanted to make one open to anyone. It started life with releases every other month that included digital/traditional art, music, photography and writing as well as an interview with a new and upcoming artist. Another interesting element of the site for its first six releases was that I made a brand new look for the site for every release. Once we reached our 7th release, we were getting far to many submissions and traffic to keep this up and converted to a static design. With the static layouts, I tasked some friends to create a custom one-off CMS for the site that was used until its final release. The final static design was the best of the bunch, which first launched in 2006 with the release of issue 38. It featured quick shortcuts to the latest issue/interview and on the home page we tried to highlight a weekly site that we loved, latest news from the site and community and up coming events that would be important to artists. It was also the first time we featured a log in system. Users could sign up, comment, submit their works and more by logging in. Also starting in 2005 at the end of the year we’d release special Best Of mini-sites, showcasing the most popular 60 submissions that year.

In 2011, I decided to close the doors. I hadn’t been able to give the site the time it deserved since starting at EA Mythic. Sadly, it totally slipped my mind to take higher-res screenshots of the older layouts so sorry for the low resolution. It’s a nice trip down memory lane really.

Static Layout 05 – The Final Design