Soup to Software is a monthly newsletter by Jonathan (Jono) Brandel—an award-winning graphic designer and programmer—exploring the expressive potential of technology at every step along the path of creative practice.
The title plays on the phrase “soup to nuts”, an idiom meaning from beginning to end. Traditionally used to describe full-course meals, it’s been adapted here to describe a process that spans from the earliest concept to the final shipped product—from soup to software. I’m interested in what it means to work across every level of a project: ideation, design, implementation, distribution, and everything in between.
Each month, I write about the artistic, technical, and entrepreneurial challenges, successes, and failtures of working solo across disciplines. I share progress on projects, document my tools and techniques, and reflect on the structures that support creative independence. That includes publishing annual income reports, aggregating GitHub stats (both public and private), and occasionally offering exclusive freebies to subscribers.
With a background in Design | Media Arts and Latin from UCLA, and an MFA in New Media from the Paris College of Art, my work pairs unlikely subjects—like lithography and pixel sorting, or emojis and Latin—into accessible expressions of complex ideas. Over the years, these experiments have led to collaborations in visual music, open-source projects like Two.js, and exhibitions at TED, Sundance, Tribeca, and SIGGRAPH.
Subscribe to get full access. Join me as I explore the whole creative stack.
