This is the good old-fashioned, personal blog of Jason Orr. I'm talking turn-of-the-century blog. Geocitied blog. Online diary with wacky gifs and backgrounds because why the fuck not web log. In spirit anyway. As a grown-ass designer I can't bring myself to mimic that specific aesthetic, but if there's not a wtf-have-I-stumbled-across level of weirdness then I'm not doing it right.
It's personal. It doesn't augment a product, extend a brand, grow a community, or establish my credentials as an industry expert before pitching this great idea to book publishers. (Although I do have book ideas call me?) It's as scattered and random and varied as I am. I'm trying to learn here. I'm trying to share here. I'm trying to figure out how I think, what parts of me are interesting and which hopes I should abandon. Or at least gently set aside. As someone rapidly approaching 40 this might be the most mundane mid-life crisis ever. So come on, ride with me. Or just watch.
Or don't. I don't really care. I don't track page views or sessions or bounce rates. I certainly won't ask you to convert. There's no analytics because Undercolored is for me, and I've been analyzed enough thank you. I'm tracking action and growth through the content I put out, and nothing else matters.
If you want to know more about why I started Undercolored, read the first post.
I'm a designer living and working in Austin, Texas. I design products, apps, websites and design systems for clients and agencies. I'm a founding partner and Design Director at a small studio called Smith. You can see my work here.
I have a beard, an extra 20 pounds, 3 year-old-twins, and propensities for heat aversion and whiskey. I look serious, but I'm not.
You can follow me on Twitter, Medium, Instagram. There's also Dribbble and Behance for design stuff. Just be warned: I'm erratic at best. If you're serious about getting in touch email is best. Say hi.
I built this site on Pelican, which is a static site generator powered by Python. I went this route because a static site allows more flexibility for some of the things I want to experiment with here in terms of code and design. I have zero experience with Python, so forgive me. I went with Python over the Rails or PHP static site equivalents because I wouldn't mind learning a little Python. I anticipate having slightly more use for it than the other coding languages, but I suspect it doesn't really matter all that much for my purposes or skillset. But it was easy enough to get going.
Last updated: February 21, 2016