This is the website of me, Jon Armstrong, currently residing in Salt Lake City, Utah with a supermodel rocker wife, Heather, a beautiful daughter Leta and the Former Congressman Henry “Buck” Chucklesworth Hamilton Armstrong. I am a stay at home father, photographer and still do some design work. My design portfolio is here. I haven’t updated it for a couple of years.

Recent work includes:
Design, architecture and coding (including Movable Type and CSS) for Alpha Mom.
Published in Issue 8 of JPG Magazine
The template and CSS work for dooce.com
Design and coding for 3hive (where I contribute occasionally as well)
Design, coding and consultation for The Daily Mumps
Design and coding for Sonya Terjanian’s portfolio site
Design and coding for Rasmussen/Su, an architectural firm
Coding, content management and consultation for Shani Richardson’s portfolio site
Design, coding, content management and consulting for Hanson General Contracting

I’ve been involved in publishing in one form or another from a very early age. In sixth grade, we had a class project where we were put in groups and created a magazine called “Gossip” which featured a very graphic cover, marking my first design project to go live. As editor, I mandated we all create covers and voted on the one we liked the best. Mine won after a tie vote and a talk about the impact of the design. The school board featured our class work on the bulletin board at it’s offices. I felt like a million bucks.

In high school, several debate and theater students started an underground paper when I was a freshman. The tradition had it that seniors would put it together and when we were seniors we managed to get a couple out after contentious editing sessions. My favorite piece was an editorial I wrote after learning that the school district based their attendance policy on meetings with the largest employer in the county.

I am also a musician. I’ve been in several bands, mostly through high school and college. One band, Swim Herschel Swim opened for No Doubt in 1992 & 1993 several times as well as others and helped create a huge wave of ska bands in Provo, Utah. Following Herschel, the rhythm section (myself, the bass player and drummer) along with the sax player formed a punk jazz exploration called Swimpigs.

In college, I worked for a semester on the student underground paper in Provo, Utah called Student Review. That same semester was the one that Herschel started, so I only got a couple of things published before deciding that I needed to focus on the band. Through that group, I met several people right after I graduated who would not only provide a great source for a ton of freelance work, but with whom I’d start another publishing venture three years later, grid magazine. In the world of dream jobs, this was one of them for me. I was able to explore weird methods and treated the magazine covers as I would an ad. The publisher didn’t get involved too much and I used that to create a body of work that I’m still very proud of. grid lasted until 1998. Later that year, I got a job at CMP in San Mateo as an associate art director for their recently acquired and now defunct LAN Times. The day after I moved my first wife out to San Francisco, and roughly six weeks after I started, CMP announced they were not going to publish LAN Times any longer. I decided to look for web work, as that was what drew me initially to San Francisco. Two and a half months later (and after squeaking by on freelance work), I started as the online art director for Red Herring’s online presence. I was very caught up in the dot com foment of San Francisco and during the first month and a half of employment at Red Herring, I had an idea, long brewing, for a web site. The idea was for consumers to post reviews of products and rank them.

Blurbomat was registered as a domain in early 1999. I pitched it to a couple of VCs, but I discovered that epinions had already launched and let the idea go after the VC interest waned and I decided I wanted to work in an agency environment.

Blurbomat hosted my portfolio for a brief time while I got a job at an agency and then in 2001, I started blogging by hand coding it, with only minor exposure to other blogs. I moved to Blogger in the fall of 2001 and then Movable Type in early 2002. I began to take blurbomat seriously in 2003 when traffic grew to more than a few dozen people a day.

Colophon
This site is published using Wordpress. Code is massaged in TextMate prior to inclusion in the templates. Most images are shot in RAW and are edited in Photoshop Lightroom and Photoshop CS3. I’m digging on Aperture 2, but we’ll see.

The photos in the flickr photostream and on this site were taken with any one of the following:
Canon 5D
Nikon D70s
Nikon Coolpix 990
Canon Elan IIn (circa 1997-98)
Holga
Polaroid

The flickr images are styled using CSS and generated via flickr supplied javascript.

Generally, I use Apple products to write, photo edit and make music. Currently, I use a Mac Pro as my main machine. I like it. o