thestoryofjory.com

Yesterday I finished the first piece of art I’ve done in over 4 years.

I’ve never felt like people got what I was trying to do with this type of work. I did a lot of pieces because they made me happy, and because I thought they would make other people happy, too. But the more I did it, the more it felt like people were being pointlessly, overtly critical or just generally confused as to why I would spend my time on this at all. It bummed me out. Then for a while after we moved from Oklahoma, I was just pretty bummed out in general. So I stopped drawing and painting altogether.

I’ve been at Bocoup just over three years now, and I finally feel as though I’m among people who will get it or don’t, but are enthusiastically supportive of one another’s creative pursuits whatever the case may be. So for our Bocoupfest art show, I made a keyart of our mascot, Bob the Rooster. Bob is comprised of 1,038 keycaps in 3 colors, which I spray-painted on the top and bottom side of each keycap. That took an immense amount of time and I will probably never do it that way again, but if you want to see the end result in real life come see it at the office sometime!

A photo posted by jenn (@jenn) on Apr 20, 2015 at 10:15am PDT

I’m irrationally exuberant¹ to announce that I’m going to be the new Training Coordinator at Bocoup!  Although the company primarily works on consulting projects, they’ve also begun adding jQuery, Javascript, and HTML5 training in Boston and abroad. I’ll be helping build the training curriculum, coaching developers to become better instructors, coordinating training sessions, and evangelizing Bocoup and the Open Web movement. Developers at Bocoup are “kind of a big deal” and I’m looking forward to helping them make the Web a more dynamic, accessible and democratized place. In short, I think it’s a great fit for my skills and interests.  I’m sure I’ll be writing more about what we’re up to, but in the meantime, check out these classes at Bocoup and tell your friends.

¹Yes, it is a little ironic that I’m sharing a flash video here.  But remember how cool this was in 2001?

This website has long been my catch-all web presence. I’ve tried making it a sort of ‘one-size-fits-all’ space for my blog, professional and personal portfolios, and social connections; but I’ve never been quite happy with how it all fit together.

In truth, it didn’t. Like many other products, if you try to make your website do everything, chances are it won’t be very good at anything in particular. Co-mingling my personal life with my professional work on this blog sent mixed messages that didn’t do much to support my personal branding efforts. That’s what I saw as I monitored this site’s analytics. Pages displaying my past work didn’t generate any meaningful traffic. And the hacks that had to be done to display that work in this theme and template on a static Wordpress site didn’t make it look its best.

With help from my favorite graphic designer, Michael Champlin, I’ve now split the two conflicting personalities on thestoryofjory.com. The new site, joryburson.com, will be home to an edited collection of past work tailored to individual companies through the use of a ‘hire’ subdomain. And I’ll be free to continue blogging about whatever I fancy on this site, without much worry about confusing a potential employer. As an added bonus, it’s quite a bit easier to navigate with fewer pages!