About Armistice Designs

Brendan Portrait

Welcome.

John Steinbeck said that you can know a man best not by what he has done, but by the plans he has made. 

So let this website serve as a place to sketch out all of the bright and colorful plans that float like clouds across the landscape of these pages. I am not a stranger to plans. 

As a child I planned my first serious story: a boy and his family are on a boating trip in the Atlantic. Tossed by storm and waves, they cross the Bermuda Triangle and crash on a rocky island—an island where every ship or plane ever lost has found itself stuck. But with so many stranded in this desolate place, it is no longer desolate; it has become a place of discovery. 

In school, I planned careers in the clouds: in meteorology, first—and then, as a pilot, threading a needle through the purple and blue haystack of cumulus and cumulonimbus. I planned for a new perspective on the world below; I planned to disappear into the world above—to become a glimmer of dust in the high and chalky dome of cirrus. 

Later, my plans turned more active; more political: I planned a novel charting the course of a military coup in America. At university, I planned political campaigns against cynicism; I planned to get lost in the terrain of New Zealand’s distant geography; I planned a book on 9/11. 

After college, I planned new industries for buying food, for staying fit, for crushing obesity—and new apps for automating the monotonous and surfacing the insightful. I planned to drop everything and move across the country—not for pragmatic reasons—but for the romantic; the idealistic. West.  

And all the while I planned new stories—stories for battling intolerance, stories for probing the imagination, stories for changing—even—how we tell stories. And I planned to be better: better at design, better at music, better at being. Better in order to create; better in order to become something more than mere plans. 

Some plans succeeded. Some plans expanded. Others were abandoned or reborn. But still I am dreaming. Still I am planning. Now, I plan to do something with these plans. I plan to share them. With you.

- Brendan Steidle-Soto

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