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I felt like maybe I should put some kinda useful information about myself on here somewhere...
Some notable clients...
The Action Blast |
DSFZ/Dem Southernfolkz |
Into It. Over It. |
Remember Paris |
Design-related Employers (dates earlier than '08 are probably a bit off...)
2009-Current • New Trigger Media Group INC, Chicago IL • Owner/Designer
2008-2009 • Platform One Entertainment, Chicago IL • Art Director/Designer (in-house)
2005-2008 • Below Zero Design & Print, South Holland IL • Designer (in-house/contract)
2006-2008 • ASIS Magazine, New York NY • Designer (contract)
2003-2006 • Shore Color Lab, Munster IN • Photo Retoucher (in-house)
2001-2003 • Nix-Nax, Homewood IL • Sales/Heat Pressing
Grab a drink. Have a seat.
Here's the unnecessarily long story of art in my life...
...because why not?
As cliché as it may sound, I have been drawing, coloring and creating for as long as I can remember. When I was 10, I started creating with a purpose. At first, I began re-creating sports logos as I saw fit. Not that I knew it at the time, but this was my first exploration with typography. At 11, I began drawing caricatures, mostly of celebrities, but also of my family. When I was 12, I took drawing lessons from comic book artist Jeff Bedon, and spent the better part of the following years creating comic book characters. At 14, my older brother started school for graphic design, and I learned about quality drawing and coloring utensils. Amazing, haha.
As I started my first band at the same age, I began learning photoshop (v4.0, daaaaang...) for the sake of creating flyers and other promotional tools. As I discovered the internet (years before cable and dsl and social networking and so many other things that are so standard these days...) I began teaching myself html so that I could create a website for my band. I was pretty excited to be able to incorporate scrolling text marquees. I had skills! Hahahaha.
By the time I graduated high school I had a pretty firm grasp on everything needed to promote my band. As soon as I turned 18, I started touring, and offering simple design services to other bands, while staying on top of design trends so that we could keep impressiong our fans with edgy merch. While at home, I worked at a screenprinting/tshirt shop, learning about all that stuff, although I just wasn't really feeling Adobe Illustrator at the time. We were NOT friends. Me and a friend started a half-ass design company called Half-Day Designs. No idea why. In retrospect... we kinda sucked... but I completely blame my friend and his ridiculous love for the Bevel & Emboss and Drop Shadow effects. Oh, Tim, you silly, silly man...
When I was 19 or 20, I got a job in Indiana doing photo retouching for a ton of portrait studios. I woke up at 6am every morning so that I could clean up senior portrait complexions, take some gut off of women in glamour shots, add hair to balding dads in family portraits, scan and color correct hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of film negatives each week, and get ripped off by the worst examples of independent business owners I would ever meet. They're not around anymore though, thankfully. I hope hey got busted for all the illegal financial stuff they were doing.
When I was 22 or 23, I "left" that job to do freelance photography. I had been shooting on film since I was 14, and had even taken a couple classes at the local community college to learn how to develop and print in a darkroom, so I bought a new Nikon D70 and started shooting. I actually did pretty well, doing some shoots for Hopeless Records and Action Heights, amongst others. For some steady income, I checked out a local independent design firm, Below Zero Design & Print, on reference from their landlord/an associate. After showing them what I could do, they hired me to work from home starting just a couple days later... and just in time too, because I was going broooooke! That's what I get for taking that awesome cruise to the homeland. Nate, the owner, helped me advance my design skills to amazing extents, and also taught me Illustrator. Over the next few years, I'd also learn InDesign (while we began laying out a nationally distributed magazine), Dreamweaver and CSS (as I continued to improve my musical endeavor's online presence), and I'd garnish a reputation under the moniker of "Jaime Radar," while doing tons of flyer designs for By A Thread Shows, which really helped me get a foot as a freelancer. As a company, we'd graduate from three of us in our bedroom-sized office to a ridiculously large office, and hire several other designers, delivery drivers, receptionists, and eventually even bought a delivery van. And then I left...
The urge to freelance became overwhelming, so I went out and bought a new home setup, notified all of my personal clients, and developed a nasty bout of insomnia. To this day, my record is 5 days with absolutely NO sleep... ending when I fell asleep for only 20 minutes, while lying on my floor waiting for a friend to come pick me up for a party. I then proceeded to stay awake for another two days.
Eventually, having too much free time got boring, and I went in search of an internship in downtown Chicago. I discovered Platform One Entertainment, and started making regular trips to the city to help them out with design work, since they had no in-house design team — they just had employees with an extremely basic knowledge of Photoshop. The original plan was to just hang out, make some connections, get some cool experience, and then go back to freelancing. After a few months though, I put in my notice, and was offered a full-time position as art director/designer. So I took it, and spent close to a year overall designing absolutely nothing but web and print work for bands and musicians. How awesome! Buuuut eventually I wanted to freelance again, and had a brilliant idea...
So in 2009, I incorporated New Trigger Media Group, INC. At this time, I bowed out of my current musical endeavor, and devoted my time to creating, managing, and expanding my own media firm. I was partially inspired by the homecoming of Jeremy Jackson, who I had met a couple years previous, when he came on the road with a band I was in. He was visiting home from Los Angeles, where he was making an awesome name for himself creating amazing music videos. I reached out to Joey Southside from The Banner, who we had been on tour with the previous summer, to be our illustrator, and got Bill Whitmire's contact from a friend who he had done a photo shoot for, which wielded results nothing short of awesome. The plan was to slowly expand to include other artists, as well as offer screenprinting and webstore hosting.
Not a month later, I received a random call from Chris/By A Thread Shows asking if I knew anything about screenprinting, as he was interested in starting a screenprinting company. This is the greatest example you will ever hear for "impeccable timing." Before I knew it, we were running a screenprint shop as well. Then... before I knew it, again... we were doing so well that it was quickly becoming our main service, in place of design/media services. As great as steady business is though, I needed to get back to designing. Again, many things fell into place perfectly, and I sold that portion of the company, and relaunched New Trigger Media Group, with a heavy bout of promotion of our media services. Things went well, and I re-opened a New Trigger Media screenprint shop in June of 2010.
So here I am now, keeping at it with NTMG, now working with a couple more artists and salespeople, while also keeping the screenprinting under control (so far anyways). Extremely soon, we'll be launching our webstore hosting site, catering a full range of services to our clients, from concept, to design, to production, to vending. There are some more plans after that, but that's a secret for now. And that's, for the most part, my history of art and creation... still in the making...