Hello, folks! I’m Jon Jones, and I’d like to welcome you to my new blog. My previous blog, smArtist (still located at https://www.jonjones.com/), will now be retired and archived in place. A lot of technical and educational resources have linked to my articles over the years, and I intend to be a good internet steward and leave them in place so all hyperlinks still resolve properly.
Years ago when I started the blog, I intended for it to be an ongoing work and personal development blog, charting my progress through my career in the game industry. I started out as an unemployed contract artist, got a studio job as an artist, then moved onto building and managing art teams. As I went, I blogged about everything I was learning and what I knew. I was lucky enough to get in on the art outsourcing world really early in the game industry, and my articles eventually established me as an expert on the topic. After a couple nasty layoffs at the height of the financial crisis, with few prospects in hand, I decided I’d reached a crossroads and started my own company, smArtist, as the first (and still, to my knowledge, only) art outsourcing management agency in the industry.
I ran smArtist for several years, working freelance as a guy that builds and manages art teams. I did a lot of writing and podcasting to help artists break into the game industry, learn how to act professional, and to manage their careers effectively based on my mixed bag of published mistakes and successes. I’ve spoken at conferences, done a lot of consulting work, and built a reputation as a pretty good guy, by many accounts. Over the years my work and travels took me from Oklahoma to Oregon, California, Texas, and finally New York City.
Fast forward to present day — January 2019. Now I work for a tech company in their technical sales department, helping producers and project managers use Shotgun, the media collaboration tool I love using to manage projects. I travel about 30% of the time from work, I’m married, I live in Brooklyn with three cats, and for the first time in my life I have an actual nice, stable, life, a good job that I love working with people that respect me on a product I believe in, and things are good. I’m finally in a place now to exit the desperate freelancer survival mode I lived in for so many years and figure out what having a normal life is like.
For so many years, all of my energy was spent on my career and furthering my own ambitions because that set of survival skills I developed got me out of a really difficult upbringing. I wrote a book about it:
Now I’m in a place where I can start to work on myself with less of a furious desperation for survival clouding my thoughts. And since my job situation is now secure, I don’t have to spend almost every waking moment self-promoting or relentlessly educating myself to stay current or being wide awake at 4am having full-body shaking panic attacks about work the next day. Good for the abs, but exhausting.
So that’s why I’ve decided to reboot my blog. I’m interested in nurturing and developing others aspects of my life and personality that aren’t simply work. That’s not the only thing that defines me any more, so this blog is going to be me exploring and enjoying life.
I may blog about my cooking experiments or the Trello board I have set up to manage my recipe wishlist and my skill progress over time. Another day may be me sharing my Duolingo username to compare scores. Perhaps I’ll share an article about document management for creative businesses that I published for work that I’m particularly proud of, and the cool tech and devices I used to develop it. And maybe some day I’ll feel like unloading some heavy business relating to my hellish Evangelical upbringing. Hell, I might even repost some of my favorite Bones-related mistweets when it inevitably happens again. And it will.
All that is to say, hey, here’s the first post in the next big, fun journey of my life. More than anything, it’ll be about what I’m learning and how I’m trying to continuously improve myself every day, no matter what. Keeping a log like this is important to me and helps give me perspective, and it’s a way for me to better mark time as it passes. I’m nuking Facebook and sticking to this blog and Twitter moving forward. Thanks for reading!