Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Welcome to Ten Minutes With. Today we're sharing ten minutes with Jon Setzen.
Jon is the creative director for Media Temple. Jon, how are you doing today?
I'm great
thanks for having me on your little program here.
Thanks for being here. Why don't you to take a couple minutes here just tell us a
little bit about yourself, how you got to Media Temple, how you
got involved in design.
What was your career path to get to your current place?
As far as design goes, as a kid
you know being
seven or eight years old
I used to like to
make art at home. I made lots of collages of
the soccer teams I liked and hockey teams I liked and then by the time I was about nine
that segued into doing stuff around music.
I was obsessed with a lot of English bands when i was quite young - I had a lot of
family in England so
I grew up listening to the Smiths, Joy Division, those sorts of things,
and uh...
by junior high I was making zines and
in college at the University of Oregon I ended up as
the music director of the radio station, where I started making rock posters
uh... more zines and things like that
segued into a
job working for the San Francisco Chronicle
in
their design team
in the late 90s and
that was my first foray really into online
and i'd loved it and I moved to New York and started my own studio that ran for
about ten years. I worked for a lot of awesome
brands and artists and dance and things like that. I made lots of rock posters and
then took an agency job for a couple years and just realized I was
really tired of client services
and Media Temple was looking for a creative director and i've been a
customer here for a while and
I had heard what a great place it was to work and they were looking to do
a big rebrand which i really enjoy doing, so
I've been here for about
I don't know about a year and a half and it's really
the nicest place that that I've worked.
The people are amazing and the leadership's amazing and
the work-life balance,
which I was really looking for, because I have two little kids,
is exactly what i wanted. They understand that people need to
spend time with their families, which is which is a difficult thing in the
agency world.
So your background is in
obviously graphic design and web design as well as publishing
for the newspaper. How do those things all
sort of inform your design aesthetic or your design choices?
Well yeah, I mean
you know the newspaper thing is interesting because
I started coding HTML...
one of my good friends in college
actually, and this is 1994,
had an ISP out of his parents garage
and he taught me how to code HTML. This is, like,
before you could change the background colors on an HTML page and I
just loved it. It kind of was that
segue that I was looking for from making zines where i put together a bunch of stuff in
go to the copy store and then you know handout things in the
the whole HTML thing just made it so instantaneous and it was kind of
mind-blowing. I remember my dad saying to me, when my grades were not great in college
"I hope you don't waste your time on this
web page nonsense."
But I did but anyway I digress a little bit but um...
I've always been interested in really simple design
and
from having a love of old jazz covers
uh... and also old Smiths covers and
a lot of the Peter Saville stuff
they did for New Order and Joy Division, I've just always been
interested in simplicity and trying to do
as little as possible on a page. It was a little one frustrating
working with clients a lot when
if it's not...
if there's not a certain amount stuff on the page, they don't feel like they're
getting their money's worth sometimes.
It's obviously sometimes more of a bold statement to put less on the page
so that's...
I think simplicity is something that I always try and
focus on.
But
when I used to make rock posters I really loved how free form they could be,
you know. If i was making a poster for a band like Built to Spill
it could really be anything I want. I remember drawing
this little geometric
cityscape of New York... it didn't
really have much to do with Built to Spill but it looked good and so
I enjoyed that, and I still try to do a little bit of freelance
stuff on the side for clients that I feel uh...
allow me to do whatever I want and right now I
do some work on the side in the UCLA department of art
which is mainly making posters and postcards for a lot of
the stuff going on at the art school there, which is really fun.
So you have outlets outside your day job at Media Temple.
Do you feel that helps you stay creatively engaged to have these sorts of
little
projects outside of work?
It does because, you know,
one thing I really love about working at Media Temple is that we're on this
path right now that's really focused.
It's not like I walk in one day and we have like a pitch that I'm going to work on for
two weeks and
try get back to something. We're very focused on what we're doing, which is great, but it's
somewhat one-dimensional in the sense that, you know, it's one company it's
always the same client so to speak and so
having outside stuff whether i'm just
doing something for a friend or starting a little side business with my wife
it's important to have that just to have thirty minutes to sit by
yourself in a sketchbook is really empowering.
You mentioned the Media Temple is going throug a rebranding
campaign right now that you're a part of. Can you tell us about that?
What's the
what's the underlying purpose of this and how have you executed on
it so far and where are you in that path?
I mean I think we're pretty we're pretty close. We're working on...
we want it to be very consistent. We don't want to just
but a br a brand new
looking website
and then everything else sort of feels the same, so we're really working on
various things on the web site on our account center,
checkout process, messaging,
things like that. Because, you know, Media Temple is is one of those amazing
companies that
when you mention the name Media Temple to someone who is a customer
the reaction is always "Oh my god I love that place! I can totally depend on
them..."
um... when I
used to run my own studio I hosted everything on Media Temple because i knew if I
ever had a problem --
if I messed something up on our server which I did far too often
because I'm not a very technical person --
I could call media temple and they would rescue me and
and I just think that
we feel that we need to put that forward a little bit more. We need to, there's
amazing people here, we need to show more
of what's going on
here at the company. One thing that we have been doing the last year
is trying to really celebrate our clients because
we just have an incredible roster of clients so we've been starting to make
featured videos of our clients and you can see a lot of those
on our site and also on a microsite we set up called "Made on (mt)."
So I can't give away too much
on the rebranding but it's
pretty aggressive.
I'll say that it's going to be
it's definitely something people will talk about and I think it will
be really really positive for the company.
We've been working with a
fantastic design studio in San Francsisco called Character
on this because
we all felt like we needed a little bit of outside perspective too.
As far as the process, you know we've we've done everything from brand
workshops to lots of user testing and um...
all the stuff you want to do
for a rebrand so it's been a really fun and challenging project.
I'd imagine that that it's it's also a little bit fraught, because Media Temple
has been a successful company. It's not like something that was failing and
you were rebranding to
try and gussy up the marketing a little.
is their a tension there when you've got an already successful product that you're
trying to
tweak or in some way tell a story that you haven't been successfully telling
before -- but you don't want to lose what you've already got, right?
Right I mean O think that's sort of the fine line with it all and I
think that
we have been telling the story all along but
not to everyone. But our customers and know the story and people understand
the value of the company and I think what we offer we offer something that a
lot of other hosting companies don't
don't offer
and that is,
you know, we are basically the choice for the creative class today, if you have a...
and, you know, I meet people from time to time who are like "Oh you're at Media Temple -
I've heard of that place. My buddy has a design studio that hosts a site there." And I'll say
"Where do you host your site?" and they'll say other hosting company very sheepishly,
it kind of reminds me of a conversation I overheard a little while ago where
there was a guy
at an airport and someone said "Is that an iPad or is that a phone?" It was
one of those like
Samsung phones that's kind of halfway in between
and, you know, he answered the question with about a minute-long justification
of why
why he didn't have an iPad.
And i feel like it's almost the same thing when creative people are
hosting their site somewhere else.
They tell me why they're not with Media Temple and how they should be there and
whatever, so...
We want to portray that a little bit more
i think i'm trying to be uh... I don't want to give away too much
but I agree that, you know, there's a lot of equity in the
brand already
and uh...
you know the company is
is uh...
is doing great and our products are getting better and better and better and
and that's something that we're not
we're not really promoting enough right now.
So we want to figure out a way to do that but
we also really wanted
one of the some focus on on our customers and the people here which you
which isn't happening on our website right now.
Great. And speaking of outside pursuits we mentioned a couple before but
I'm really curious about this because i had no idea about you in
this area but you apparently have a a candle company as well? Tell me about
that.
You know, this is possibly the most random thing I've ever done
aside from moving to LA from New York but
the uh...
it's kind of one of those things where, again it goes back to trying to stay creative
you know outside of work as well and do something different and
and his didn't feel like doing any more client work and
I'd been up in Vancouver, Canada talking to my grandpa who is a totally
inspiring guy -- he's like
95 and he's been a photographer, a book binder, you know, he was in the war, all
that stuff and
before that he ran a
tobacco factory -- pipe tobacco factory -- in Zimbabwe
back when they called it Rhodesia, and
he used to blend pipe tobacco and I remember being in his studio - his book-binding
studio and his dark room when I was a kid i could smell that
that smell, you know, that was built that is kind of like etched into all the books you
know, because they've been in the factory and
I always loved it and
I was driving past this candle
place that's about two blocks from where work here and I went in to ask them what
it takes to make a candle.
It was kind of fascinating
but I just thought there was something there
there's something very nostalgic about that
and I'm really
interested in nostalgia and not in the
kind of cheesy
uh... everyone's a heritage brand scenario right now, where you see
everyone's got their logos that say "Established 2011" and
things like that -- which doesn't make sense to me, but anyway
that's just me being jaded -- but you know so I went in and I
went through this process with them uh...
taking in this tobacco that I thought
smelled like my grandpa'ss and giving them the ingredients and
they're amazing the the people in this lab, they just kind of
reverse engineered it and made this smell that when I smelled it I literally
teared up
because it just reminded me of being a kid so much
and then
I sort of decided it was going to be this
brand study that I was going to try and do. I don't know anything about candles, and
I don't know anything about the candle market
but I felt like if I could create a really good story around it, which is a
legit true story,
then people would buy it. And they have been! The weird thing is, like
you know, I've sold a few hundred... I've sold almost three hundred candles probably
in the last six weeks,
all online and nobody smelled them before they bought them.
And
this story that
we tell about the candle is more about my grandpa and people are
really connecting with it. So it's been
interesting and, you know, doing the packaging and
and the naming and the brand development on that has been really fun.
My wife's helped me out a ton, too.
I'm working on a couple other ones but it's it's a very, very much
a side business and I'm way focused on,
you know, here and my family and then selling candles which is
a totally random pursuit
but but very fun.
The name of the candle company is Arlo Jacob which are my kids' names.
It's arlojacob.com
and uh...
you can find it there and I'm
contemplating whether or not to do some wholesaling. I've had some stores
asking about that
but that you know it's nice and i've been using shopify
for the website
for the e-commerce which has been really great because I used to build
e-commerce sites in like x-cart which is just a nightmare so
uh... hats off to
to shopify as well but um...
I'll have to send you guys some candles
Great. Well we're out of time, but I appreciate you taking the
ten minutes to talk to us.
yet thanks a lot Davin I appreciate it