ABOUT COREY
Hello. I make a lot of things.
I’m Corey D.M. Johnson. I build companies, software, products, stories, music, photographs, live experiences, and the occasional idea that refuses a useful category.
I’m interested in the moment when an idea stops being theoretical and starts making demands. It needs a name. Then a shape. Then a system. Soon it has opinions about typography and a folder structure. By then, I’m usually in too deep.
I don’t think art and business live on opposite sides of the brain. A company can be a creative act. A piece of software can have rhythm. A live show can be both an engineering problem and an emotional one. A book can reorganize the way everything else makes sense.
The common thread is imagination made specific. I like taking a vague possibility and giving it enough structure to push back: an interface you can use, a song you can hear, a room you can walk into, a character who starts making decisions I didn’t approve in advance.
Some work here is released. Some of it operates in the real world. Some is being tested, rewritten, renamed, or held together by a frankly admirable amount of optimism. I include the unfinished work because becoming is part of the practice — not an embarrassing hallway on the way to the finished picture.
This site is my attempt to keep the range without flattening it into a list. You can explore it as a world, use the Index like a sensible person, or wander between the two.
If you came looking for one tidy category, I’m sorry about the map.
What I do, when a list is useful
- Build and operate creative businesses
- Design products, software, and interfaces
- Produce live experiences
- Write stories and books
- Make music and audio tools
- Photograph people, places, and performances
- Prototype ideas to learn what they actually are
How to read the labels
Not everything here is finished, and that’s not a clerical error. Each project is labeled by where it actually is now.
- Operating — Real, active, and responsible for invoices.
- Released — Out in the world where other people can encounter it.
- Active Build — Substantial, working, and still changing.
- Prototype — Built far enough to answer some questions and raise better ones.
- Concept — Designed enough to see it; not built enough to pretend otherwise.
- Evolving — A meaningful body of work without a final form yet.
- Paused — Currently quiet. Not necessarily gone.
- Archived Study — A bounded record of what was made and learned at the time — not a promise of current maintenance.
In the spatial version of this site the label is also the geometry. Each landmark is a fold in one continuous sheet of paper, and how far it has opened is read straight from the project record. Finished work lies flat. Work in progress stays creased, and it stays creased even when you walk right up to it.
About the images
Where a real capture of the work exists, that’s what you see — resampled, but never cropped, graded, or composited. 26 of 26 projects have one so far. The rest show a clearly marked placeholder. I’d rather show you a labelled blank than invent evidence that something shipped, that customers exist, or that a physical prototype was ever built.
Several projects also carry an explicit note about what they are and are not — a simulated demo, an unlaunched system, a concept with no hardware behind it. Those notes are part of the work, not fine print.
Have a thought? Send it my way.
Work, collaboration, strange ideas, useful questions — I’m open to a good conversation. No elaborate pitch required. A normal human sentence is excellent.
I’m less interested in choosing a lane than in finding the road between things.