Re-use, re-purpose, re-think, re-imagine, re-do, re-engineer, re-cycle, and re-spect.
Respect what? Everything. The planet, the materials, the process, and each other. Creation isn’t about getting ahead; it’s about giving back—leaving things better than we found them, and enjoying the act of making along the way.
As a studio, we strive to work with recycled or sustainable materials whenever possible. Five percent of our annual net profit is donated to a 501(c)(3) that invests in the future. Currently, that partner is Burners Without Borders, whose mission is to spark creative solutions when and where they’re needed most — helping communities rebuild, re-imagine, and thrive through shared effort and artful action.
Our Story
Blue Gothic Design Studios was founded in late summer 2014 by Ron and Amanda Fitzherbert in Las Cruces, New Mexico. The timing coincided with the annual Burning Man festival at Black Rock City — a year the founders, both longtime burners, couldn’t attend. In hindsight, that absence became a spark: the creative energy that would have gone into the desert instead took root here, as a studio built on curiosity, respect, and a desire to make things that matter. Ron also founded Playafire.com, a living artwork that exists both online and on the playa — part digital flame, part desert camp — devoted to creating, sharing, and reigniting art in all its forms.
Ron’s Path
Ron’s creative life has always run in parallel with his professional one — orbiting art, film, and community. In the early 1990s, he served on the Alexandria Commission for the Arts and volunteered extensively with the community access television station in Arlington, Virginia, where he worked as a producer, crew member, and multi-term board president. Those years set the foundation for a lifelong relationship with visual storytelling and public creativity.
A graduate of the Hollywood Film Institute, with certifications in feature film and line production, Ron has worked professionally on PBS and independent film pilots — from gripping cables on a series pilot to directing photography on a feature-film funding trailer. (His first brush with film came much earlier, as an extra in The Kennedys of Massachusetts — a small role that lit a spark never fully extinguished.)
He later founded the Computer Graphics and Animation Forum on America Online — an early online community where artists and technologists explored the future of digital media together.
Since moving to New Mexico, Ron has continued to bridge disciplines: participating in the Las Cruces Plein Air Competition, joining the West End Depot Artists Cooperative as both studio member and board member, and exploring photography, videography, furniture design, and mixed media. Blue Gothic became the natural culmination of that journey — a place to merge art, technology, and purpose into a single practice.
Amanda’s Craft
Amanda’s creative work centers on jewelry and beadwork, combining color, form, and texture with an intuitive sense of balance. She continues to expand into lampworking and silversmithing, bringing a tactile, meditative dimension to the studio’s output. Her work reflects the same guiding principles that shaped Blue Gothic from the start: care, sustainability, and joy in the act of making.
Together, they see Blue Gothic as both a workshop and a philosophy — a space for collaboration, experimentation, and the respectful transformation of ideas into form.