Jarad Johnson

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.

MediaSlap: Project Review

Tuesday
07.08.08

Over the past many months I had been working with Departika on a Photoshop brush site that would allow users to buy and sell high-quality brushes for a reasonable price. The idea stemmed from the efforts of Jason Gaylor, Dan Spencer and myself selling brushes solo style on our sites Designfruit, Flyguy Designs, and Scrapbook Brushes respectively. After lots of bickering, crying, and hugging we have released the site for the public to disport.

The idea was generated nearly a year ago as the team was seeing great response from Jason’s side project Designfruit. A couple of us quickly leeched on to the gold mine, which turned out to be a lunch mine, since that’s about all it earned me. Regardless, the need and desire for high-quality Photoshop brushes was evident, however, a proper outlet for these tools to be positioned on the market was not established.

Although I’ve lead many smaller projects, this was the first large scale idea I’ve been involved with taking from sketches and thoughts to marketing and celebratory drinking. The lessons learned are copious and are sure to impact future works of similar structure. The ideas were simple and straightforward—how we would execute them was far less elementary.

The first, and possibly most daunting task was to establish a system in which MediaSlap earned enough revenue to support the investment of time both initially and ongoing. The balance involved in these decisions are tricky. You must keep the artists attention while still putting money in the pockets of those who run the site. For this, we reviewed the systems of several industry monsters, such as Amazon, Ebay, Etsy, and iStockPhoto. The correlation ended with the number of visitors MediaSlap would receive on launch. Zero. The internal argument lasted quite some time with one side pushing for a higher percentage for the company and one side pushing for a higher percentage for the artist. Each side had it’s own strategy; if they earn more from each sale then they wouldn’t need that many people involved, if they take less from each sale they are providing the individuals contributing with more influence over the sites success. In the end, less money in their pocket was the plan that prevailed, with expectations to adjust in the future.

The other challenge that proved to be equally difficult was creating and maintaining a schedule that allowed the office to continue producing client work while also providing time to put the hours in on MediaSlap. Many companies that have successfully accomplished this goal, such as Google, allow employees one day a week to focus on projects that would potentially benefit the company in the future. They approached this with a slightly different idea—work your ass off and shut up. This innovative idea lead to many hours spent slaving away into the wee hours of the night, ending in long hours with lower productivity levels. The other option would have been to switch a clearly client oriented company to a product oriented team, which would have meant loosing people that usually have a place in larger firms but tend to be a dragging anchor in the boat of venture development. This was obviously not an option in play at the time.

Due to my end of employment at Departika, I’ll not be reviewing the trials that the post launch site goes through, or the performance of the product within the market. However, I will say that the input of many industry professionals I spoke to while promoting the idea were very encouraging, and I will be very surprised if MediaSlap is not a great performer for years to come.

Tolerance Within Reason

Saturday
06.21.08

A few days ago I saw a tweet from Cameron Moll regarding a witty comment he left on a blog post from 37signals. The purpose of the post was to call out the lack of proper spelling or grammar on the part of applicants to their brand altering design opening. Being as I recently wrote on the topic of professionals who seemingly refuse to communicate clearly in emails, I thought I would be in step with their complaints. After making it through the third paragraph I found myself wondering if they could possibly be serious. Yes, the majority of their aggravations were warranted, but there was one which I found to be quite ineffectual when coupled with these other palpable mistakes. The issue being, that some applicants put a space between 37 and signals, leaving it displayed as 37 Signals. Is this really a big deal?

First of all, let me be clear; If I were applying for a position at 37signals, I would most definitely do my homework and be sure to match each and every application or company name to a T…or a space in this instance. It shows that you are familiar and intrigued by their products, which will obviously put you in a great position with a group that desires as much of the spotlight as possible. Suiting, as they make some of the best products that turn professionals everywhere into cattle, following along as they lead us into a realm of better productivity and easy communication.

The issue that adding a space to 37signals independently determines their abilities or consideration of employment is just silly. I differ in opinion with most, not as an employee but as an owner. Let’s say I’m heading a new project, let’s call it iJarad. I’m receiving emails and come across a very suitably candidate, but she happens to refer to my business as Ijarad. Would I get all cranky and whine on my popular blog (we’re still pretending) just so everyone can renounce these morons who dare change letters in my God-like name. No, I would not. I would most likely take into account the details that matter, such as spelling of words found in the dictionary and of course the quality of their work.

The comments on this topic were plentiful and rightfully objective, as I’m sure many readers have been in a similar situation. A few comments struck my attention more so than others. Friend and respected colleague Jason Gaylor wrote:

I’m surprised by the responses to this post. I don’t see both sides as much as I see the need for the applicant to nail the details. Had I been applying and had to type “37signals”, I would have really made sure to get that right. I don’t really feel for anyone that didn’t. If the applicant is unable to see the errors or take time to fix mistakes before they apply, they aren’t right for the job. Furthermore, they could have run it by a few people that would catch those mistakes. Sloppy.

Jason, which is my current employer (don’t mention this article to him) says the error of mistaken branding is worthy of diminishing all chances of consideration for the job—which makes me wonder how I wiggled into my position, because I spelled Departika as “Defartika” when I applied.

Other intelligent or comical comments included the guy who used “McDonalds” as an example that you should know and understand the brand—to bad it’s McDonald’s, including the apostrophe as another commenter pointed out. Then Paul shares his insight by explaining the logo of Intel is portrayed with a lowercase i, yet you will very rarely see it displayed that way in context of body copy.

All disagreements aside, the 37signals attention catalyst that is their blog is a never ending stream of arrogant and controversial opinions, which is why it’s one of the most interesting to read.

Photoshop Brushes For Scrapbookers

Thursday
06.12.08

As many of you probably don’t know, I owned and operated a little site named Call Me Real for many months. The site was used to give away Photoshop brushes to a very accepting crowd. After realizing I had to make a choice of either lowing my quality of brushes, dropping them completely, or charging a small amount in exchange for my work, I chose the third with great expectations of customers understanding the situation. At this point the mix of viewers turned into an ugly, mean and quite offensive mob. They stormed the doors of my house and threw tomatoes at my dog. All the while, there were still plenty of brush sets being purchased.

When I questioned many of my customers on what they planned to use the brushes on, it was almost always something to do with scrapbooking. Where as, when I asked the tomato throwing door stormers, it was general “I w@nt th3m t0 b3 l33t!!!1”. I came to realize it was not the ever loving scrapbook community that became so upset over someone charging for quality work (how dare they) but the toddlers over at DeviantArt. For those who have never experiencing the preschool style art community that is DeviantArt, I envy you’re ignorance toward the art community that was immature enough to have an open discussion on rather a 15 year old girl taking nude pictures of herself with her dad’s webcam was art or porn. How about illegal?

Enter Scrapbook Brushes, the re-designed and re-focused Photoshop brush collection. Brushes for scrapbookers; not for children. Take that. The new iteration features many new brush sets from amazing artists such as Jason Gaylor and Dan Spencer. A number of artists will be added to the site in the coming months, as well as several product manufacturers taking advantage of the currently vacant products section. Interested in working with me on a brush set or scrapbook related product? I’d love to hear from you.

A New Generation

Tuesday
06.03.08

I have recently had an ongoing discussion with several colleagues and friends regarding my generation and the way we often perceive and handle business situations. The responsibility to deal with a generation that was raised in an entirely new way is something many employers and managers are terrified by. Some, however, see it as a chance to help their business excel, by taking what is often seen as faults and helping mold them into massively effective business tools.

This is a topic I have a lot of interest in, and am sure to touch back on many times. For now, I’ll leave it to Bnet and their very informative survival guide on managing millennials.

Creating Subtle Attraction on Your Mac

Wednesday
05.21.08

Making things look good without taking away from the end goal is something I focus on in every aspect of design. This is the case for everything from the furniture in my house to the icons on my Mac. For those not the least bit interested in the interior design of my modest house—no worries, we’ll skip that for today.

My focus on subtle beauty lately has been my MacBook Pro’s desktop and dock. Ever since I’ve had my first Mac, my desktop icons have been HUGE. I mean, just ridiculously large. The point of this was to avoid clutter, by leaving no room to toss my loose ends around. After many different file structures I feel my organization level is top-notch, and am comfortable sizing down the desktop icons from 6 levels above obnoxious, to reasonable. After resizing the icons I decided to put the name off to the right rather than below…which led to adding detailed information below that, and of course dropping the font size. It was Spring cleaning, but two years overdue.

After laying the smack down on my size issue I noticed something about the default leopard icons; I didn’t like them. I went out and found a number of spectacular icon sets and narrowed it down to the Leox Graphite Bundle mixed with Unified. These two sets really compliment each other when using Leox Graphite to replace all system folders and Unified to replace all drives, and CD icons.

At this point I thought my adventure was complete, until I ran across Matt Brett’s Flickr account. While browsing through some design work, I stumbled upon two other fantastic aesthetic improvements. My favorite being the stack drawers. These nifty little containers really help stacks look like more than a bunch of icons ran over by a steamroller.

The other two great finds from Matt were the Solid Wood desktop background and the Smoked Glass Dock. The last item on the list was replacing some of the Apple default icons (specifically iChat, iTunes, iCal, TextEdit and Address Book) with the Black & Blue set and a little color mod for iCal called iConiCal.

The end result of mixing these fantastic resources leaves you with a simple, sexy desktop and dock that any geek will surely fall in love with.

The Importance of Professional Appearance

Monday
05.19.08

Update: When speaking of spelling and grammar errors within emails, I in no one mean the occasional missed typo. I am referring to clusters of mistakes, and poor writing mixed together to create a jumbled mess or incomprehensible email. I agree with those who said “typos happen.”

There was a time in my life when I did not care what others thought of me. Let’s label these days as my punk rock phase. During this time, I wore what I wanted to wear, I said what I wanted to say and most importantly, I did what I wanted to do. Within these actions, there was very little consideration of the judgments of co-workers or even my boss. This was not based on a lack of respect or an anti-authoritarian view, it was simply what seemed right. Everyone should be able to live exactly how they want, without having to change themselves to please others. My work ethic was still excellent, and I treated people better than your grandma does at a church dinner. I did however, get fired from two different jobs with the hollow reasoning of “You’re just not working out.”

Now, in my old age of three years after the previous event, my outlook on appearance has changed significantly, while still stable in the roots of being who you are. I wear jeans with less holes in them, I save flip-flops for special occasions, and try to wear a vintage style button up; as for the tube socks, well, let’s just say there’s a pair laid out for me on my coffin. I would wear a suit without hesitation, but it would have to be from a time long gone when a man made a suit, not the other way around.

The turning point that lead to my realization that your appearance directly reflects who you are came to me in a different way. After entering into the industry and all that comes with it, I am continually disturbed by the low-level of communication skills that are considered acceptable. Spelling and grammar errors litter every other email, as if whomever is writing it is so important they can’t take 30 seconds to make sure what they are typing makes a bit of sense. This level of arrogance seems to subtly communicate that the author believes his time is more valuable than yours. It’s like sending a client a thank you card, and arriving at their door to slap them in the face while they read it.

Unlike the simple phrases to dodge communication I believe this issue to be directly contributed to laziness. The sender has the ability to send a clear message to the reader, but chooses not to. It was my anger over these silly emails that first allowed me to make the connection between people who write sloppy and people who dress poorly. They are both evaluated by the effort they put forth to connect with the other side.

I’m not saying everyone should be wearing a jacket and tie, that’s fairly over the top and can even send the wrong message. Your dress, and attitude should directly reflect the audience you seek, which is normally very representative of your own personality. If your focus is on making websites for punk bands, the ripped up jeans and Sex Pistols tee are probably a good choice, but if you’re looking toward the mob for some business, go get that striped suit.

There is always the option to continue to communicate, dress, and express yourself however you wish, disregarding the viewer and their impressions; but unless you’re Hugh Hefner, this will probably make you look like a complete jackass.