I’m just going to come out and say it up front; the project you all know and were excited and hopeful about is officially done. Dead. Finished. There are various reasons why I came to this decision. Believe me, it was a hard one to make. I think it was mostly due to the fact that I’ve been working on this on and off for so long that the excitement and creativity grew too thin for me to continue what felt like dragging this project along. I know to most of you, this doesn’t seem like a big deal but to me, AetherAeon was the perfect project. The content I had access to was incredible. But at times it did prove to be overwhelming. It’s an extremely hard decision on my end since this project was basically my whole life for the past 4 years and as a result, learned an incredible amount of things all because I had this crazy idea to make a project based on an old, antiquated form of science. It was a strange series of events that led me to the point in which I decided to pour everything I had in me and my bank account into a project that literally changed my life and helped me grow as a designer and person.

Those were literally my exact thoughts when I decided to start up what is (was) now known as AetherAeon. I first came up with the idea to start up after listening to the 4 disc concept album “The Alchemy Index” by the band Thrice. The album had a total of 4 discs, each disc contained six tracks representing one of the four classical elements: Fire, Water, Earth, and Air.

I had a basic understanding of what alchemy was, like most people, all I knew was that it had something to do with a bunch of old dudes trying to change things into gold, and something about trying to live forever. But after that first listen, something sparked my interest. I wanted to dig deeper and try to do some research as to what exactly alchemy was.

I started by looking online and found out a lot of information. I found out that alchemy was basically the predecessor to modern-day chemistry and was used as a way to study, interpret, and maintain a sense of understanding of what makes up the world around us. I learned all about the alchemical groups, the four basic elements, and most importantly of all, I learned that each element had a logo symbol attached to it. And the fact that I am a graphic designer who loves looking at a good logo made me incredibly excited and I took it upon myself to do something creative with all this newfound knowledge about alchemy.

After countless hours of reading, learning, and doing research I set out on a journey I never knew would bring me such joy and excitement as well as exhaustion, fatigue and resentment all within the span of a year, twice. Oh and also being broke too. A lot. All the time. But that sort of thing was a given from the get-go. I tried keeping my head up during those time where I just wasn’t feeling it anymore and ended up taking several breaks away from AetherAeon altogether and focused my time and attention to my various other projects that didn’t require as much money to uphold. But time and time again, I would get that urge to come back with fresh new ideas and a brand new outlook for the future. But the main thing that always held me down was the lack of money and time. I can 100% absolutely tell you all right now that if only I had the amount of money and time I needed in order to design and print up the things I envisioned in my head, I know for a fact AetherAeon would be at a much larger scale of awareness than most of you could imagine. How do I know this? Because I believed in myself and my vision for the project. It’s just somethings never turned out the way I wanted them to and my confidence and desire slowly started to fade away.

The fact that was is a self-initiated project that involved lots of hours of research, design, maintenance, promotion, ordering, billing, and shipping should have made it all evident that this was a project I was absolutely meant to do. But like I said, not having enough time coupled with not having enough money ends up taking its toll on you mentally and you start to second-guess yourself and your abilities as a designer and entrepreneur.

But all in all, I could never have imagined the overall support and admiration and help and suggestions I’ve gotten along the way by my friends and family and people from all over the design community. AetherAeon has brought me closer to people I used to only kinda know and would occasionally see at shows. But after I started talking about AetherAeon to people more openly, lots of my friends soon became very interested and were down to help me out in any way they could. By buying the 1st and only run of shirts and wearing it at shows or by helping out with packaging and shipping products on weekends or by listening to me babble on about new concepts I thought of the night before. Looking back, I absolutely learned an insane amount of things that I will take with me wherever I go. Things that I was once afraid to do like ship packages of different sizes is now the simplest thing I know how to do.

To all those people who helped me along the way, I want you all to know that I very much thank you all for everything. You will never know how much your words, actions, praises, help, and excitement means to me. AetherAeon may be done but I’m not. I’ll definitely be starting up an entirely brand new project eventually and will be back at it sooner or later with a much clearer vision and objective in mind. Can’t say when that will happen because I have no current ideas right now. But I will say it will probably happen sooner rather than later. There will be one final sale of AetherAeon merch available up until the end of the year. And even after I might still sell some AetherAeon prints on the new store system I’m building on THIS very site. So all hope is not lost.

So much time and heart was put into this project and so much knowledge and courage was taken out. Thank you all again.

– Raul