I’m Trace Meek, a designer, artist, photographer, writer, and musician based in Western Massachusetts. Whatever medium I work in, I enjoy the interplay of the heart, the mind, and the hands. I love to search for meaning, develop ideas, and express them in visual and intellectual form.
Originally from Atlanta Georgia, I attended Georgia Tech and studied electrical engineering for a year and a half. Then I took some time off to work in restaurants, play in bands, and focus on the arts and humanities.
In the late 1980s, intrigued by New England’s gothic mystique, literary culture, and music scene, I migrated to the beautiful Pioneer Valley of Western Massachusetts.
After working as a farmhand for a few years to establish residency and gain life experience, I put myself through art school at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst (BFA cum laude, 1995). When the internet came along, I saw a creative opportunity and ventured into a career in web design.
Currently I work as a web designer and photographer for a nonprofit. When I’m not busy building websites, graphics, and taking photos, I enjoy ice skating, playing music, painting, drawing, reading, writing, and puttering around in my art studio.
My life’s work consists in exploring the intersections and synergies between my technical aptitudes, my intuition, and my artistic inclinations.
About this website
My original Trace Meek dot com website has been online since 2001. As of 2026 it turned 25 years old! I celebrated by creating this new blog so that the old one could retire (I’ll keep the old one around for posterity, but I’ll be publishing here going forward). The publishing engine is the amazing WordPress (the self-hosted kind). The design is a homemade theme that I built by hand, using a starter theme generated with underscores.
This site is a labor of love — an art project. I want this site to question what a website can be, two-and-a-half decades into the twenty-first century. I conceive of every page as a self-contained essay or meditation that puts writing and imagery first, and invites the reader to be present with the content. I want this site to be like a finely-crafted book, magazine, or journal, not a mass-produced technological system. What’s old can be new again.
I respect and appreciate your attention. I don’t show you ads, I don’t nag you to sign up for a newsletter, and I don’t require any payment to access the content here. (Though you are welcome to buy me a coffee if you are inclined.) Hopefully I’ve succeeded in creating a quiet place on the web — far from the madding crowd — where you might enjoy a moment or two of refuge. If you enjoy my work and want to share it, I humbly request attribution, and ask that you link back to the source page on this website.
Enjoy your visit, and thank you.