About
Seasoned digital professional within Apparel, eCommerce, Technology, Entertainment and Non-Profit segments.
My professional history begins in New York City working for a traditional boutique Advertising Firm with an actual "Mad Man" who taught me my typography chops, several years later moving out west to San Francisco where I was a "Big Fish in a Small Pond" in Bay Area Interactive Agencies. Shortly after, I heard about the world wide web at a spaghetti social and the rest, as they say, is history. I was fortunate to be in the right place at the right time securing a role with one of the first interactive Advertising Agencies - Organic. Heady days in the infancy of the internet working for a company that would go on to dominate the space to this very day. While at Organic we produced web projects for Broderbund (Ages of Myst), Levi's, and an early version of starbucks.com
Following Organic, I was offered the position of Creative Director at Red Ball Interactive which was acquired by Think New Ideas who was then acquired by AnswerThink (lot's of acquisitions back then). During my tenure we executed the first large scale web projects for Visa, Avery Dennison and Getty Images. Once the final acquisition was complete I was redundant (how rude!) and became a free agent co-founding Chromatrope, with three industry colleagues shortly after the dot-bomb.
"You can never learn less, you can only learn more." - R. Buckminster Fuller
Chromatrope was intentionally designed to be different, providing agency level services remotely, "the company without an office" was how we were referred to. Over time our clients grew used to the idea that we would come to them. This structure also allowed me to move back to New York in 2003 while continuing to work with clients in the Bay Area and Silicon Valley, as well as New York, the East Coast and beyond.
Under the mantle of Chromatrope, I have had the pleasure of working with a diverse array of B2B & B2C clients such as Ford Racing, Pitney Bowes, The Motley Fool, Nature Conservancy, Graj + Gustavsen and the Buckminster Fuller Institute. In addition to my work with Chromatrope I also continued to provide freelance white-label services to a pair of agencies in New York and San Francisco.
I follow a hands-on approach to Creative Direction, knowing the capabilities and limitations of the medium I am working in is extremely useful when innovating new approaches and ideas. Keeping myself up to date on current platforms, trends and skills is essential - building out a project with technical requirements I feel right at home as I can open up the hood and see what's going on or if there is a need to create a visual element I can roll up my sleeves and get down to it. This approach of continuous professional development, and an insatiable curiosity, gives me the ability to converse intelligently, and purposefully, with team members of each part of the house - creative, technical, marketing, analytics, sales - who each have their own dialect and lingo.
See my full bio on LinkedIn
Call: 516.640.7950
Email: joe@joeskopek.com
Skills
"Design is a way of life, a point of view. It involves the whole complex of visual communications: talent, creative ability, manual skill, and technical knowledge." - Paul Rand
Management: Successfully managed teams from 8-58, tend to lean on the Agile / Software model for planning, time tracking and project management. I am software agnostic, whatever the best tool is for the job. Excel at listening to the client, mindfully speaking when appropriate and providing a bridge from client to team and back again.
Sales: Thrive in the pitch, building new client relationships, calming nerves, finding new ways to approach project and client challenges and of course A.B.C.
Creative - Copy: Wordsmith stories in my sleep, love to shave and whittle the copy down to the bare necessities. My word-love also includes penning a quick tune on my guitar or keyboard as the need arises.
Creative - Art: Creating the perfect story of images, or a simple brand element, to engage and activate the viewer is the goal. What is the story, who is the audience and how loud do we blow that horn.
Creative - Moving Image: If a single picture can garner a thousand words imagine the story at 60 Frames per Second. Video is the ultimate Venn diagram of Visual, Audio and Music.
Creative - VR/AR: Virtual and augmented reality is fast becoming the new frontier for story telling - the hardware has finally caught up with the concept. Currently developing a headset concept that builds on the "Opti-Grab" principles.
Tech - Coding: Wrote my first line of HTML code while co-authoring the book "Web Media Magic" targeted at interactive designers making the leap to the web, since then HTML5, PHP and recently began exploring React's possibilites for WebApp development.
Software - Design: By the numbers; Photoshop 10+ years, Illustrator 10+ years, Premiere 10+ years, I have a working knowledge of the remainder of Creative Suite including After Effects, InDesign and Animate.
Software - Web Code Platforms:Working understanding of HTML5, CSS3, Javascript, PHP and others. CMS Wordpress 10+ years, daily working knowledge of themes, Avada, Divi, Bootstrap, application of customization within pages. For back-end personalized, content-led experiences; Adobe Experience Manager (AEM), SAP Hybris, and Salesforce Commerce Cloud.
Software - Audio: Apple LogicPro and GarageBand, my go-to audio app.
Personal History
"Change is neither good nor bad. It simply is." - Don Draper
Childhood on the North Fork of Long Island spent with fisherman farmers, teenage years on South Shore as a gearhead surfer/skateboarder making science fiction Super 8 films with my friends, then off the NYC for college at FIT when the city was rough & tumble.
After college lived in Manhattan and Brooklyn, started a band which actually had some "industry interest" and played all over the city for years. Pure joy.
Got married and moved to San Francisco, spent a lot of time in the great outdoors, the club & DJ scene which was a crucible for the creation of burning man and the web as we know it. IMHO. Started another band and performed at such notable locations as the altar at Trinity church, got really into organics and saving the world with the internet.
Ten years later, moved back to NY, my son was born and life couldn't be better.
Today I am living the dream - working on several projects that just might change the world for the better - good times. That said, don't have a lot of time for new work in the near term - unless...
Well, thanks for the read through! That was a lot of words to consume but hopefully it gives an insight into who I am and what I bring to the table. Thanks for you time and consideration.