jeffrey + upstairsloft

» http://convoy.tumblr.com

My soul spoken through photos of knacks and things on somebody’s Tumblr. Beautiful things. Old thins. Renewed things. Cameras. Bikes. Antiques. Globes. Maps. The objects themselves are captured beautifully.

During our senior year in design school, in 06/07, we were tasked to develop our personal portfolio identities. I went by Upstairsloft, Kate went on as Offbeatscience (soon-to-be Plaid Ruffles) and Rob… well… Majorminor. The three of us kept in close contact while we went on our merry, different ways. Well, I actually went on to marry Kate. Go figure.

While Rob spit hot fire with a few of the top design studios in located in San Francisco, I held mine down at a medium-sized marketing/ad agency and Kate hustled the freelance game. Living separate lives, but never apart, Rob and I joined forces to kick Majorminor into full-fcuking throttle, alongside Lance and Alex.

Today mark’s Majorminor’s one year anniversary.

Most designers know we can spend hours, days, weeks and months tweaking the most minute details of a design that 99% of the world’s population won’t notice. But with crunching time-wasting hours like that, we learned to be efficient with doing good design, practicing an efficient and smart process—otherwise, how are we gonna to stay paid? What about clients? Oh yeah, the guys with the design problems who pay the bills. There’s them too… and we learned to do business with them. Most of them rock. Truth be told.

Anyways, keeping this short, as I’m still grindin’, the theme to our first year goes something like…

“I’ll sell ice in the winter, I’ll sell fire in hell, I am a hustler baby… I’ll sell water to a whale.”

Keeping design real, fresh and stackin them papers since 2009.

Been a while. A long while. A few things have happened in the last 2 months.

1. Majorminor has been working on some great projects and moving at full speed with those. Which brings us to my second point.

2. I took on full-time job as a visual designer at StubHub in mid-June. This has been a smart move in expanding my breadth in learning how an internet company works and how design can drive its marketing efforts. This has also caused us to scale back on Majorminor projects—for the good—allowing us to focus on the kind of work we want to take on. We’ve had quite a few lessons learned which have caused us to reflect on the past year and a half and re-evaluate new goals and objectives. All studios do this. It’s our time. Double design duty equals twice the hustle. I’m happy.

3. Kate and I celebrated our one-year anniversary in the Caribbean. We had three plans which were dependent on the finances. Go to Europe. Go on a cruise. Or road trip down to SoCal and hit up the tourist attractions (like that huge Dinosaur seen in “The Wizard” with Fred Savage. With Majorminor moving at a good speed, my new seat at StubHub and Kate rockin’ it at her studio, we chose to level it out and cruise the Caribbean and kick it at the playaz suite. We had a balcony and a larger room than the rest of the cruisers. We’re also booked for our first and last grown-up hoo-rah in Vegas experience before Kate and I multiply.

Check the Mrs.’s blog, my ninjas. She pretty much broke it down. I love that chick.
» Lampin in the Caribbean

While direct marketing and advertising crawl along the interwebs, it’s not hard to notice the decline in print—but where printed matter matters, it’s well sustained (packaging, editorial [Yes editorial! despite the iFads and kindles] and printed correspondence). Hell, it’s even an art.

There’s no doubt that I’ve been designing a lot for the web—websites, blogs, conversion pages… the list goes on. Without any classes, I’ve learned to design for the web—not code, but design. I’m familiar with what the set of capabilities are per coding language. If I’m not, I know what questions to ask—so I’m not designing blindly. But this is something I’ve picked up from working with and interfacing with developers.

With print, ohhhh print is one beautiful beast to control. Nerd alert. You know that scene in Avatar when Jake Sully wrestles the banshee before linking up and soaring through the wind and all? Yeah. Sorta like that with print. There’s so much prep work that goes into designing for print and there are so many decisions made when the job is on press. Sometimes it’s a headache, sometimes it’s tedious, and it definitely sucks major moose knuckle when clients request changes just before we go to print despite the Final sign-off(s). But the end result is a beautifully, finished piece if you managed to treat her well from the concepting phase to the press check.

I’ve been working with a fair share of start-ups (Majorminor just started up no more than two years ago); and while we have an impressive portfolio to date and our list of capabilities continues to grow, we needed some sort of correspondence to hand-off to push people to our site.

Let me write down our information for you.
Do you have a Post-it note?
You got a pen?
Oh yeah, it’s m-a-j-o-r-m-i-n-o-r-s-f dot com.
Here’s my business card.
Here’s my card.

The response we get and the impression we make when we hand out our cards urge us to adopt a similar model when working with our start-up affiliates who hire us to develop their identities. I’ve even recorded some metric to lay out the success of this program.

Awesome stuff/doing + awesome card = Double the Awesomeness = excited and intrigued people who visit your site.

See. It’s science.

Majorminor Business Cards: Crane Lettra 220#, Third Bay Letterpress
Calvin Ma Photo: Waterford 640gm, Mercurio Brothers Printing
Fun Sponge: Mohawk 130#, Third Bay Letterpress

(click image)

ADAC and the faculty at Sacramento State’s Design Department were kind enough to invite Majorminor’s own Rob Martin and me, alongside Hans Bennewitz and Christopher Lee, to speak.

Hans Bennewitz, Christopher Lee, Rob Martin and Jeffrey Tanhueco will spend the evening recounting very different paths taken post graduation. Design degree in hand they have found homes for their particular design talents in Sacramento, San Francisco and Los Angeles. Come hear their stories of trial and tribulation and ask questions as this panel of young award winning and published designers share their relatively new found wisdom.

This talk has forced me to reflect on the past few years. To the naked eye, I’ve made some pretty foolish moves—foolish moves that carved the path to where I am now and where I’m going next. Rob and I will be delivering separate presentations, but we will meet somewhere in the middle and talk Major.

Tuesday, May 25, 2010
6:00pm – 9:00pm
AIA Central Valley Building
1400 S Street, Suite 100
Sacramento, CA

All the speakers were asked to design a commemorative poster. Here’s ours.

(click image)

It felt like the corner store closed. It felt like when they stopped playing Fresh Prince on Nick at Nite and replaced it with The Nanny. I thought Operation: Leave Facebook would feel like wart removal. Instead, it felt awkward. Like, now what? Don’t get me wrong, I’m not addicted to Facebook. It’s not my crack. But strangely enough, here I am, a measly 13 hours later, back on Facebook—I appear to be like a crackhead denying his addiction, regardless of the white, powdery residue around his lips.

I can’t totally blame it on my weakness. I mean, Facebook is the Devil. No, really. It is. Just as I hit the “Deactivate Account” button, the Devil flashed a screen—reminding me of my emotional attachments. It almost worked. I still hit the “Deactivate Account” button. Alas! I was free. I rid myself of this filthy past-time of aimless meandering, reading stupid status updates, feeling offended when other friends receive 43 comments because she informed everybody that her foot itches.

*iPhone Mail Chime* sound

Thinking I was free, Facebook emailed me a friendly little message. Whatever. Time to pop in a movie and doze off.

I woke up this morning, feeling free. Too free. As ritual has it, I grabbed my phone, checked the time, checked email… scrolled to the page where my Facebook App used to be… Then it hit me. The image that the Devil flashed before me came rushing back to my memory. Jonathan, Dean, Kyle, Edgar and Lauren will miss me.

I felt distant from them. I was reminded of the good times we had. That image of me and Jun high-fiving with the Golden Gate Bridge in the backgrund just days before he moved to New York… Jon snapped that photo. Dean and Kyle’s pics from my wedding. Edgar and my dudes holding me up from the ground when Jun visited from New York. Me and Lauren cuddling with a gorgeous view of Golden Gate Bridge—another reminder that Facebook is one big channel in staying virtually connected with my friends across the way.

I logged back on to Facebook with my iPhone, and it was like I never left. It was like any other day of logging in. I was reconnected. My privacy for the taking. Hundreds of photos that went missing from my friends’ profiles—they’re back. It was that easy. Somewhere in Palo Alto, a Facebook employee is smiling at their statistical log of those who’ve Deactivated, Reactivated, Deactivated, and Reactivated. Damn you, Facebook, You hit me at my weak spot. You were like Don Cheadle’s character in that movie with Nicolas Cage—Family Man—showing me glimpses of a life without Facebook. Because I really did miss Jon, Dean, Kyle, Edgar and Lauren for the 13 hours I was not a Facebook member.

I was probably the 4th person in the world to sign up for Facebook. It was 2004; I was  admitted into Sac State and received an invite from my cousin, Dean. I signed up, learned more about Facebook and I thought—”Cool! A network to build from my new school.” Somewhere in between then and late 2007, Myspace was the world leader. Then I watched my list of friends populate like lemmings. I thought, “Cool! We’re connected in more ways than one.” Right?

With texting, multiple email accounts, phones, blogs and all that other social media stuff. Then the relevant became irrelevant. Status updates like “I’m cold;” garnered 25 comments while status updates with some real meaning just vanished into the void. So I am kicking it old school. Communicating through the world wide web via a blog. I noticed a pattern in what kind of status updates received the most responses. Needless to say, they were also the stupidest ones. Plus, my 3-year old nieces and nephews and sometimes newborn cousins would add me as a friend on Facebook. Ridic. They can’t type! It was a wildfire of social media that got out of hand. So I say with great pride, “such is the life,” a life without Facebook.

The bit where Steven Heller parallels design to be the circulatory system of the written word… well… genius.

An idea is the heart of every book; writing is its blood, and design its circulatory system. Design cannot be underestimated. A book that is merely composed according to a template, rather than with forethought and imagination, may be adequate for reading yet lacks the quality that makes savoring a book a complete experience. While a great text will conjure mental pictures, a great design—the marriage of type, typography and image—will give the reader added levels of perception that encourage cognition and appreciation. Even the most rudimentary design components—the texture of the paper, the kiss of a fine cut of type, the style of the running head or feet—are much more than aesthetic niceties. For this and other reasons the book must not only be appreciated, it must be revered.

» Read It Here