Skills: In the big picture, market positioning, brand strategy, graphic identity are my strengths.

This is supported with a passion for telling a story and informing concepts with images and text. One way of telling a story is to allow people to discover it for themselves -- which to me is the best way to convey information. People absorb little being spoon-fed information. Feeling talked down to, we feel patronized, passive and resistant. Instead, clues offer active means of discovery. We are naturally given to pondering, and when offered interesting questions or inconsistencies that want explanation, and when assisted with clues, we are encouraged as people to form our own lasting exclamation points. These emotional opinions, when associated with ideas, products, experiences or entities, cumulatively create strong (branding) experience.

How this information is conveyed is significant, whether it is as paper, or as environmental such as at a convention booth, a landscape, or in electronic media. Each media has its own eloquence. Off the usual beaten path followed by most graphic designers, I do think well three dimensionally, and in time-evolution processes too, which manifests as interest in unusual areas such as horticulture and landscape design. I enjoy and am skilled at traditional hand draughtsmanship, which serves me well in conveying ideas, or for the drawings in and of themselves. I offer years of experience in diverse areas.

2000 to present
Jonathan Louie Design
Design Director, San Diego

Design studio/consulting, with emphasis on corporate identity, branding, and marketing and site design.

1997 to 1999
Wired Digital Inc., San Francisco, Web Publisher
Design Director, Marketing and Creative Services

Direction of creative design staff and production specialists for marketing materials supporting Wired Digital and its products with the overall creative direction in concurrence with parent organization Wired Ventures, publisher of Wired Magazine.

External Corporate Information Website: public relations, press releases, advertising opportunities, partnership opportunities, graphic design standards, privacy, copyright, job opportunities, geographic location, product information, user-interface testing information.

Internal Corporate Intranet Website: staff oriented information spanning four companies, and three continents facilitating: departments, shared resources, personnel, policies, communication, services, support, documentation, legal, common interests.

Advertising Marketing Materials include campaign strategy and platform. Venues: ad banners, print, television, outdoor billboards, and transit-sides and corporate presentations graphics.

Marketing Collateral: Product brochures, mousepads, calendars, postcards, invitations, posters, T-shirts, caps, stickers etc.

Tradeshow/Conference Marketing Materials include booth design, and product brochures.

Wired Digital International Divisions Design Director: Visual design translation and direction in China and Japan.

Wired Magazine’s intro-spread illustration, “Weightlessness” – on the future prospect of controlling gravity and even anti-gravity, March 1998

Promotional websites for partnerships with the likes of Microsoft, Earthlink, Toyota, and Schwinn.

1995 to 1997
HotWired, San Francisco, Web Publisher
Design Director, New Content Products and Marketing

HotWired was the very first commercial Website to integrate graphics with textual content. During the initial nascent years in which Jonathan Louie directed design, Hot Wired/Wired Digital defined many of the defacto paradigms which the online world now takes for granted in navigation schemes, in both creative content and advertising models.

Adrenaline
Adrenaline was designed to engage and increase pulse rates among athletes around five action sports: rock climbing, surfing, ultimate Frisbee, river rafting and snowboarding. The websiteÕs objective was to cultivate a campfire around these dispersed cult communities using experiences, storytelling and visual verve. To answer that objective, I pioneered an eyepopping introduction to the site, which could otherwise have been experienced as a snoozer of primitive gray web typography. From my invention of Adrenaline was born the concept that became the ubiquitous intro ÒsplashÓ to every website. AdrenalineÕs downfall was not the fringe aspect of the extreme sports it featured, but the extreme dichotomy in modem/access speeds of the visitors at the time it launched in September of 1995. Throbbing visuals to a maniac on a T-1, choked to an equally fanatic demon on a 1200-baud modem. At that time, both were common denizens of the site. This hampered the ability to appeal to the junkie whose body needed adrenaline, not byte download-mathematics classes.

Cocktail
in 1995, the web community was identified as young overachievers who kicked back with equal enthusiasm and style at the end of an arduous week. Cocktail was designed to be as intimate and redolent with gauzy atmosphere as your favorite speakeasy. To whet your appetite for the weekend, Cocktail published a new feature cocktail each week on Friday afternoons. I designed Cocktail as the first Website to use frames navigation and highlighted what frames does best -- create small, intimate navigation. The very rich cocktail images were always clever, usually enigmatic, but never self-serious.

thunder@sinuous.com

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