My name is Matt, also known as Matty, and I have been a creative with design, video, audio, and more for over 10 years since I was in high school. A lot of my current and recent work are inspired by textured document and poster scans, analog video and photo imperfection, and grungy, distorted antidesign. It took me years to finally land on a style i feel like i can have mystique and important feelings to my work, but I didn't always want to go against the grain and stand out too much. This page is dedicated to what I used to make most of and show examples from over the years that I have used to learn my form and display it with all!
2014 - 2018
I was not really interested in anything tech related until i was a Freshman in high school. I had taken a couple of computer related classes in 8th grade however after taking a semester of coding classes and realizing just how much there would be to learn for the monern age, decided against web development, and tried looking for something else that would involve something creative. Many of my electives and extra curriculums throughout secondary years of school were tech, music, media, or design related such as;
• 3 Semesters Graphic Design (mainly digital)
• 1 Semester Photography (+1 year extra curricular)
• 1 Semester VREP (Blender Animating Intro)
• 1 Semester Web Design (HTML Coding Intro)
• 1 Semester music appreciation (Studying and Hands On with audio stems using mixcraft)
• Extra help for photography in yearbook publications
I found myself preferring Photoshop over Illustrator for designing, mainly using the photo manipulation functionality to create fictional vehicle liveries for NASCAR Racing 2003 Season, a 20+ year old computer game with a still active modding community. Most of my early works consist of those, school projects, and various youtube channel art.
what was used to start?
• Adobe CS6 Suite (Photoshop, Illustrator, Lightroom)
• Audacity
• Blender
• Mixcraft
2019 - 2022
Shortly after starting my first job i picked up camera and camcorder collecting. It started out with old film cameras such as Rollei 35s, Canon T70s, and even my first Polaroid camera. While film photography was reviving right around that time, the price for packs of film was building up for my new hobby and i began to check out camcorders with the intention of starting a YouTube channel. The 2020 Pandemic made it difficult to be able to go anywhere for a while which gave me time to build my collection and try out content creation using Tiktok, using the same principles of my YouTube channel. I continued to run both, with short form and interest skits on TikTok for part of the community and longer, more informative and experimental videos on YouTube
Around this time i also started trying out more physical art, starting with just custom cases for cassettes, VHS, CDs, and more for various physical media. This also actually included transferring video onto older formats, which takes up a surprisingly large amount of dongles for modernization
The editors of choice?
• CapCut (iOS)
• Adobe Premiere Pro
• Handbrake
• HitFilm Express
• FiLMiC Pro
• Topaz Video AI
2023 - now
I continued mainly with retro tech vlogs and content on both for a while before burning out in early 2025. I focused mainly on work for a while before getting the creative bug again and decided it was time to build myself a portfolio and attempt to get somewhere into design, video, or photo. During this time while selling personal belongings on the side, i picked up wanting to try Product Photography, although not flashy like actual advertisements.
I wanted to make an archive, in which retrotechlibrary.org was born. I have been working on a massive archive of my collection in Hi Res imagery, which has led me into learning web design.
Using Framer has been a unique learning curve going from using Notepad++ and Wordpress, however it has let me keep creative control over how this site looks and helps me express what I like to do with how I want to show people. Organizing the art I need for this site has been easy, as i recently also picked up homelabbing after acquiring a NAS and have been slowly learning more when it comes to coding, web design, and beginner networking/IT solutions, in which i soon hope to be able to self host more of this site as well to evolve more with everything design, videography, photography, and IT related for my future!