//Years I spent looking for that one tool that would suit my business needs the best. 

Something that can tackle all the administrative and organizational part, that would be great…. And what about general ideas, conceptualizations and perhaps even customer communications? 

Frustration of what didn’t work helped me in laying down fundaments for a new project I got into to tackle my organizational as well as creative needs (as well as that of past, present and future patrons of my services but more on that later).

We have apps for everything (often glued with A.I. we don’t really want). All promise to solve every issue but deliver noting because they cater to too many.

Over the years I have spent countless hours fine-tuning file-transfers, arched tons of terabytes, fine-combed client communications in multiple languages (both offline and online). Without much thought I used the tools everyone else seems to use… Google, Apple, Adobe, etc. 

I went back to the drawing board. As long as I can remember I enjoyed design workflows. Patterns of logical step-by-step procedures to organize what goes on in my mind. I used notebooks, drew a lot and later moved into curative apps like Adobe Photoshop (stated with 2.5), Premier (replaced with Davinci Resolve), Blender, Lightroom (happily replaced by Apple Aperture, Photo Mechanic, Digicam, Pixelmator Pro, Affinity Photo, etc.), and so on. For most of the time everything was (and still is) Mac driven.

So, I like to explore the alternatives and when spending some time with various Linux installations recently I realized that going back to the roots might actually be the way forward.

In this process I got inspired by the Open-Source mentality of Linux, its user base and especially the Blender community. With their core values in hand I took on a task to rearrange my own production workflow. 

In my creative life I always want to be able to understand how things work and what is going on under the hood as much as possible. I want to be able to do it myself, and if I have to I will dive deep (thanks to YouTube) to try to learn how to do it.  

This got me thinking. What if I create a production workflow as if it is an Operating System. A collection of organized tools, structures and protocols that can handle any job. Ah, that needs coding and that sounds boring.

In the hope to find a solution elsewhere I studied on several production tools, CRM-s, Workflow apps, Notes Apps and so on. I recommend Trillium Next Notes and ClickUp for these purposes.

Basically what I did was to layout my general workflow I use for most of my professional assignments. From pitch to brief and from production to capture to ingest, culling, editing, processing and delivery, archiving, invoicing, feedback and so on. I spent some time going over the core elements, trying to understand the inner workings and concepts behind them. 

The final concept was slowly forming. First in my head and later in a couple of failed attempts in development environments in folders on my hard drives. 

Realizing this was not really a useful state for a system to be in if it’s sole purpose is to interact with the outside world. It came to me in the middle of the night.

Why not go back to the roots? Over the years I have worked on several websites (mostly in plain html). I just payed my annual subscriptions to my websites (running on WordPress and Photoshelter).

With the concepts worked out it took me several hours of non-stop building to get the scaffolding of a new system:

Say Hello to: 
Creative_Engine OS, currently in version 0.9 running as my new website right here in this browser.