Hey, I'm Jared. I design mobile & web apps and enjoy music, gaming, & landscape gardening. →
Latest Writing
motifs - remember a stranger
- remember a stranger on Bandcamp, Spotify, and Apple Music.
East & Southeast Asian artists have been increasingly popping up on my radar this year. From everything I can tell, there’s a vibrant, burgeoning music scene in these areas that is going largely unnoticed by western listeners, than that’s a real shame because there are a lot of fresh perspectives to enjoy. It’s a real blessing to be a music lover in a time when there’s so much opportunity for new discoveries from the other side of the world.
I discovered Motifs (typically styled as all-lowercase “motifs”) via a YouTube recommendation. They’re a shoegaze/dreampop band from Singapore, and their debut album remember a stranger came out in the fall of 2022. It’s an impressive debut. Though the music feels like it neatly slots into a languid, familiar style, the band brings a couple secret weapons to the recording.
Featured Work
TaxAct Xpert Help
I worked with the TaxAct Assisted Help team to design the next iteration of their efforts to promote a new expert help service. Xpert Help connects the customer with a knowledgeable tax expert to help answer questions that can’t be answered by Google or TaxAct’s own general-audience documentation. An initial design had been launched to a small set of customer during the previous tax season, and the business was ready to take it to the next level as they planned to roll it out to all customers in the next tax season.
Latest Links
theneedledrop: The Smashing Pumpkins - ATUM (A Rock Opera in 3 Acts) ALBUM REVIEW
Look, I take no pleasure in this album's failure. I would love nothing more than to see the Pumpkins blaze exciting new trails, but ATUM is a colossal snooze fest—lyrically lazy, musically uninspired, and painfully obtuse.
Innotech Group. Identity and Site Business Transformation
Hey, Peter, what's happening? Yeeeaaah, this is really great and all, but I'm still gonna need you to come in on Saturday. Okay? Thaaaaanks.
Translating Song Visualizations Into 3D-Printed Car Speaker Covers
Tasked with developing customized offerings for their automotive clients, Plaghki and his team began looking at using Materialise's technology to produce 3D-printed speaker covers. [...] the team was able to translate those values—amplitude, frequency, beat, pitch, tone, etc.—into a design language.
The Atlantic makes the case for RSS.
"There’s a lot of anger towards Elon for what he’s doing to Twitter, but lets not forget the damage Google did when they turned off their RSS reader. We’ve lost a too much freedom, independence, and curiosity to corporate algorithms."
Amen, brother.
Does It Shoegaze? Harp Edition.
Not gonna lie, I'd listen the hell out of a harp-based shoegaze band. MAKE IT REAL