About Me

Hello, my name is Jesse Claggett and I've spent the better part of my life doodling, drawing, and more recently, designing away. From my early years as consummate drawer my love of creating images and designs carried me through college as a Fine Arts Major and eventually into a career as a Web Designer. However, more important things have happened along the way; I married a beautiful girl from Belgium and of just recently I now have my own bouncing baby boy (perhaps he would like to help me doodle).

Back in second grade a schoolmate of mine got bored in class and so he turned over his worksheet and drew a picture of a shark. It was just a simple child's line drawing but the act of turning a line on paper into an image was pure magic and so I still believe today. Furthermore there was something in the lines and proportions that he used that evoked a minimalist aesthetic beauty which instantly captivated me. I spent the next year doing nothing but turning over worksheets and doodling before I thankfully discovered an equilibrium between my artistic endeavors and school work.

Leaping forward to the end of High school I found myself with high grades and four solid years of Art classes under an honest-to-god competent Art Teacher. I had a desire to experience college and since my artistic background was the strongest thing going for me I applied and got accepted to Calvin College as an Art/Pre-Architecture major. The pre-arch major was quickly dropped and instead I concentrated on the classic art mediums (drawing, painting, printmaking, and a little photography) and graduated as B.F.A. with a concentration in painting.

That left me, as well as every other art major, stuck with a non-career related degree in the mid nineties just as the World Wide Web was conveniently exploding into everyone's consciousness. Very quickly it was realized that some sort of web presence was a mandatory business requirement and as this was all a relatively new field and early HTML easy to learn I and a great number of other art majors trudged into the Internet Design business. Thankfully it turned out that I loved working with Photoshop and I quickly grasped nature of HTML page design in both its dynamic flexibility and its limitations and constraints on the graphic design.

In the ten years since then I have acquired a wide range of experience within the Web Design field. I have gained a more substantial knowledge of coding and made forays toward more traditional graphic design. I have worked on online advertising, (Portal), corporate branding, webpage layout and design, corporate internal and external sites, creation of standards (with use of style sheets) for site content and design, kiosk interface design, personal digital art projects and game graphics. I have worked on team projects (both web design and outside departments such as marketing or employee training), solo projects, in large office and small office settings (and even telecommuting), under creative directors, with other designers and have been the lead designer on projects. I have also trained and passed on my web design experience to new employees. My background in the Fine Arts has served me well with its solid grounding in color theory, basic principles of design, critiquing skills, the creation of images or their manipulation and a general creative approach to projects.

On the side I have continued to explore other interests such as digital artwork, game related illustration and design, generated maps, game theory, reading and history. After leaving Gateway (see my resume) I took some time off and pursued a woman off to England where she was working at the time. Her name is Alison and we ended up getting married back in the USA where I went back to work for Burlington Coat Factory in their small town office of Lebanon, NH. Eventually we decided we wanted a change of climate and culture and moved to Austin, Texas. Just earlier this year Alison gave birth to our first child, Eamon.

You can contact me by phone at 512-351-5771
or through e-mail at jesse@jesseclaggett.net

Jesse Claggett 09/22/08