Call meJeffrey

In 1999, when I first decided that I wanted to be a professional graphic designer, one of the first things that I did was come up with a company name. I’m not even sure what motivated me to do. Honestly, I can’t even remember how I came up with what I did, but it stuck. That company name was inFORMATION Design Lab. The first word is a play on “in formation”, as in “I’m gonna put all your info in formation”. Man, I’m clever. The second word, “design” is obvious, and the third word, “lab”… well, lab just sounded cool.

The first place my company name started to pop up was on all the flyers I was doing for clubs around Chicago. What’s funny is for a while I used to get dozens of phone calls per month from confused party-goers looking for information on the event they were holding a flyer for. In small text on the back of the flyer at the bottom I used to sign all my flyers with “Design: inFORMATION – 773 XXX-XXXX”. People would assume “Hey, this is the number I’m supposed to call for information.” They were right. Only, they got the wrong information.

To remedy this, I decided that I would create a small website of my work and replace my phone number on the flyers I designed with a URL. The URL I settled on was www.ifd-lab.com. I never thought of myself as a “web designer”, though through the years I’d toil over redesigning and remaking the newest version of my company’s site. Sometimes I’d redesign it multiple times in a year. I started realizing that maybe I should start taking on web design projects when I started receiving a lot of emails complimenting me on my site, not the work the site was a vehicle for displaying.

inFORMATION Design Lab was the company that I owned when I first began sharing an office with Jake and Jacob in October of 2002. I worked under that name until January of 2004 when I dissolved my company and officially joined skinnCorp. My beloved company site that was one of the only ways I had of showing off my work was no longer of any use. My work was now skinnyCorp work. I was ok with it, but the ifd-lab.com stayed live, yet untouched. I can’t explain why, but I never could work up the nerve to take it down. It remained online, completely out of date. It wasn’t until recently when the contact form on the site started generating an absolutely astonishing amount of spam emails in my inbox that I realized that the time had come to let it go. I asked Harper if he could simply redirect the URL to www.callmejeffrey. ifd-lab.com is no more.

Now, this may all seem like a bunch of melodramatic nonsense to some people, but the people who are just like me will understand. It likely has to do with the way that I work, and probably the way that I am in general. I never go half way on anything. If I’m doing something, it’s because I believe in it, and it’s because my heart is in it. This is why I can’t imagine ever going back to work for an agency or some big soulless company where I trade my passion for a paycheck. I feel it in my work now at skinnyCorp, the same as I did with my work for inFORMATION Design Lab. This is why I was able to finally let it go. It feels pretty good.