Jarad Johnson

Inspirational Excitement

Wednesday
10.08.08

There are a few things that never fail to put me in a creative mood, one of those is to listen to great speakers. Lately I’ve been giving a loud, obnoxious, sometime offensive character a try and have really began to enjoy his snippets of insight. His name, Gary Vaynerchuk. His game, changing the wine world—and now the online branding and advertising world.

Having taken his Russian-immigrant dad’s business from a 2 million dollar shop to an impressive 50 million dollar thriving national leader in under 7 years; Gary has earned himself a rockstar status among many in the wine industry and a few enemies, who claim the source to his internet celebrity is a cover to sell his own stores product. That source of celebrity would be Wine Library TV, which was dreamed up after seeing a SNL skit make it big on YouTube. The allegations of trying to pull a fast one on viewers are denied by Gary. He says the show is meant to stay out of the commerce. I don’t really care because it’s smart business, but it’s good to hear.

Although the credentials are telling, the most inspiring work Gary is producing is on his less popular site GaryVaynerchuk dot com. Here he offers advice on internet branding and marketing with emphasis on teaching viewers how to build their personal brands. The episodes remind me of a podcast I once listened to called Managers Tools, minus the boring lectures and industry specific advice (stop talking about dress codes and cubicals so much). When Gary tells you how to sell, he’s not telling you how to sell wine and he’s not telling me how to sell design; he’s telling us how to sell and build our brand equity. With this, I leave you to view the latest addition, which I have retitled Gary Sitting On A Box.

Less Talk, More Work

Thursday
09.25.08

Just over two months ago I posted an article outlining a career change and have since not made a peep. Some might say that’s because no one comes to my site anymore and it’s about as effective as me telling stories to my dog but I would argue it has something more to do with the minimal amount of time my new position has left me. Mainly, when you’re trying to pay for rent and groceries without a legitimate fallback if you fail, priorities are switched around.

One of the things I’ve been working to switch around is the purpose of this site. As is, it was a creative outlet used by someone who has a day job and limited interest in landing freelance work. I am now someone who has a day job that depends heavily on landing freelance work. As you can see, I had plenty of switching around to do.

The new site will loose the blog and focus more heavily on my work. The layout will remain fairly simplistic but will feature a magical navigation by the wizard developer Ted Kaemming with assistance by the infamous Landon Lewis. I recommend both for all of your development needs. Some examples of the new design can be seen below.

Departing and Uniting

Monday
07.21.08

After much deliberation I have decided to leave my day job as a designer with Departika to pursue a partnership opportunity with Landon Lewis at Ethix Studios. This decision comes at a time when the desire for freelance work and dreaming up projects outweighed the benefits of full time employment.

For the past two-ish years, I’ve been a staffer for the famed (at least in our heads) little design firm, Departika. I joined the team when they were known as Blacksuits Creative, after just a few months of having established their business. The owners at the time were 5, and the employees were 1, with several contractors and two interns. Intern number two being myself. Due to a lack of desk space… or just space in general, I was shoved in a corner where no light shined and servers buzzed so loud that headphones blasting the Distillers did little to remedy the situation.

At this time I was a freelance designer with very little industry experience, and a touch of formal education in which I had ended enthusiastically a few months earlier to have a go in the “real world” of design. The first few months left me star struck at the beauty that was the design industry. Lots of fun, friends and beer. A few months after that and the truth hit hard, as fun, friends and beer turned into fun, friends and pulling all nighters to get shit out the door on time. Smoking cigarettes just to keep your eyes open, while once again blasting the Distillers at full throttle. I learned a lot during this time, and one of those things was that a relationship has a lot of trouble surviving when you’re working 80 hours a week and have an active Halo addiction.

With the help of Departika I have been able to advance not only my fundamental design abilities, but have also learned a lot about life. My future will be driven by the experiences received during my employment. I’ll miss the ping-pong and people, but am anxiously looking forward to growing our business and being part of great projects.

The Pathetic Host That is Enom.

Tuesday
05.06.08

Fellow Departikan, Dan Spencer owns and operates a side project named Fly Guy Designs, by which he sells Photoshop brushes and other resources. Recently his site was ambushed and taken hostage by some type of scam system (the porn links in the source code tipped us off) and all of his product earnings are now being delivered directly to the scammer. The original host was GoDaddy, and allowed the transfer to Enom without any verification. Enom refuses to shut the site down even with definitive evidence that the site belongs to Dan and not the porn spreading scam artist.

Seems Enom is notorious for being involved in scamming their clients and working with phishing to hijack websites. Beware of the evil that is Enom.

More to come...In the meantime, please help support Dan by digging Jason’s post at Designfruit.

Update:
Since my original post on this awful situation, there have been a few developments. The Digg post has been getting quite a bit of attention, but needs quite a bit more before anything substantial can come from it. Paypal has also stepped up to the plate, and cancelled the account of the fellow that hi-jacked the account. Lasty, the host has been switched by the user from the evil Enom, to the quite friendly Spry—who has agreed to shut down the account after verifican that Dan is who he says he is and the porn spreading scam artist is not who he says he is. I will hopefully be able to gleefully submit a new post when this situation has been resolved.

Welcome To My Home. Come In.

Monday
04.28.08

I welcome you to my latest endeavor. This website, still fresh with the new site smell, offers a look inside my Portfolio, my writings, and my ventures. You are also free to learn more about me or if you’re feeling adventurous you could hire me to design a website, logo, or identity package.

As for this section of the site, which I have so cleverly coined weblog, I will use it to express my enjoyment of many different aspects of life. When not posting articles about design, interviews of great people, and ranting about life, I will most definitely devise plans to take over the world. Not to worry, most of my plans fall through well short of completion.

If you wish to socialize with me, please feel free to visit any of these fantastic sites: Virb, Twitter, Facebook, or Linked In.