Greg Johns

Writer, Designer & Developer

Hello, I’m Greg Johns, a designer living in East Texas and specializing in the area of user experience and front end web development. For those professionals out their I'm on Linked in. I facebook rarely and tweet even less but I rather like posting at g+. That is, if I know you, so get to know me...

I have been working at the crossroads of design and technology since I first started using Photoshop back in the early 90's and despite all the bubbles and trends, I sill find it one of the most interesting places to make a living. In fact this site markes the 5th personal site I've put up to accomodate my fascination with personal computers and comunication.

Prior to my days on the web, I was a student of visual communication at the Art Institute of Dallas who most often found work as an illustrator or print designer. At one point I was fortunate enough to work as an assistant inker for one of the big comic book companies. Thus fullfilling my biggest childhood bucket item...

I am inspired by simple ideas and driven to find ways to make them happen.

I use my years of experience in design and development to write on the subjects. More and more this falls under tags like "user experience", "information architecture" or "data visualization".

Writing

I like thinking about and writing about design and technology. Mainly for the various companies I've worked for but at some point I would like to get my act together enought to write about it here on this site. But for now I think I'll just link to some great writing on the web

• A List Apart
• Fray
• Jason Santa Maria

Design

I love design

If this site has any main purpose it's to muse about design, someplace where I can write about, post about, think about design. Basically a personal blog on anything I think is interesting but usually whatever I find interesting has a design nature to it. Of course I could do this on facebook, google+ you name it but all those outlets seem too noisy and I rather like just doing my own thing.

So because this site is mainly about that let's just jump right in with some thoughts about typography. Oh, and it's also my daughters birthday so I'm working that in as well.

Until I can get some more written here is a link to one of my older portfolio sites that shows off some recent and not so recent design work.

Behance Profile

Development

Good development is something that came later in my professional carreer but that's because in the deductive process of designing the "how" naturaly comes after the "what" and so it went for me.

My work as a developer has been mainly as a front-end web developer. Using html, javascript and css to take the designes to life and give them interactions. This is where prototyping, testing and the most important part, the user comes in.

Having never been professionaly trained as a deverloper and learning web development only through the miricle of "view source", I have always felt like a designer first but this is only because the work place seemes to make the separation. As a good designer I don't think you can answer "what" without some idea of "how".

Most often I play the part of early prototype developer to help quickly bring a project to life and work in the key interactions that would constitute the core of the user experience. From there I'll hand the project over to more competent or company complient hands.

This usually works out for the best because I can get obsessive with code optimization and "best practices" techniques. To avoid this I'll work to quickly prototype a project then hand it over to a development team and work to facillitate further develpoment through close interaction with design and development teams.

Recent clients include:

• Capital One – Home Loans team
• Verizon – FiOS and wireless

Contact

Contact me by e-mail, telephone or snail mail to talk about design/technology or just hire me and I'll come in to your work place and we can make something.