Hey there! I'm Jared. I design mobile & web apps and enjoy music, gaming, & landscape gardening. →
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 Writing
Blushing at Andy’s Bar, Denton, TX
I went to see Blushing play in Denton this weekend. I’d casually listened to their catalog for a little over a year, especially their latest album, Posessions. It’s a really nice collection of tunes that leans into the more angular flavor of shoegaze and sounds a lot like a Lush/Cocteau Twins supergroup. They even managed to get guest vocals from Lush’s Miki Berenyi on the song “Blame”, which is pretty damn cool for a relatively small Texas band.
The show was really great. Some bands have a hard time translating tightly-produced studio tracks to a live setting, but Blushing killed it. I thought they sounded better live, to be honest. I’m not sure what their songwriting process is like, but I imagine they must work the songs out in pretty good detail live before recording. If not, they do a great job of working out the live versions. Either way, they sounded amazing and I’m a big fan now. I would definitely see them play again.
Latest Links
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
Wonders of Street View
Virginia-based coder Neal Agarwal has collated some of the oddest pictures from around the world taken by Google in his new website Wonders of Street View.