Episode 16 Transcript | Jason Johnson of Qualtrics

Peter Stevenson

Welcome to buy subject, the silicon slopes brand and marketing podcast. I’m your host Peter Stevenson. I’m here with my co host Alicia Smith, managing partner at agency and modern eight. And our guest today is Jason Johnson, associate creative director at qualtrics. Welcome.

Jason Johnson

Thank you. Yeah, glad to be here.

Peter Stevenson

It’s good to have you on. We’ve been you were on the list of original people. We wanted to make sure got on here, so we’re glad we got you here.

Jason Johnson

Oh, yeah. I know we had to delay a.

Peter Stevenson

While, but you’re too busy.

Jason Johnson

It has been very busy. The last eight months have been pretty wild.

Peter Stevenson

Yeah, I want to talk about what you’re building now over at qualtrics and kind of what you’re doing, but first let’s let people know who you are, those who maybe are not familiar with your past. Where did you grow up? What did you first do in design? When were you first interested in design? When you went to college, all that kind of.

Jason Johnson

Up in well, I grew up in a lot of places. My dad was in the air force, and then he was air traffic controller. So when I was younger, we moved. I mean, I lived Florida, Oklahoma, Idaho, Colorado, Arizona, a bunch of places, but for the most part, pretty much grew up in farmington. So right there next to lagoon from my parents’house in the summer, you can hear people actually screaming on the coasters, they’re going down the fire dragon. Yeah, I was trying to buy the.

Peter Stevenson

Air the other day, and there was like a house for sale just around the corner, and I was like, this would be a fun place to buy in the summer, and then the kids can just go oh, yeah, just go to lagoon every day.

Jason Johnson

Yeah, there were a few years. We had season passes, the whole family did, and we would go over and just walk over. Yeah, we could walk over. We probably lived if you were walking maybe a mile or so away. It’s not too far. Yeah, so it was great. I mean, I actually worked at lagoon, too. Most kids in farmington did, so we went through that whole phase. But, yeah, I pretty much grew up there. Went to high school at vumont in know, junior high, also in farmington, that kind of thing, so spent a lot of time there. It was pretty small back then. I mean, it’s like a super small community. It’s very different now. It’s, like, turned into this kind of hub of all kinds of things, which is interesting. But yeah, did that. And then post high school, went to Utah state for undergrad and really liked Logan, except the cold, windy mornings up in cash valley. But it was great. I was telling Alicia earlier, I actually studied liberal arts up there, and that was kind of, I guess, sort of the backstory. The reason I was studying liberal arts, I didn’t actually do any design work at all in undergrad was because prior, when I finished high school, I had this kind of interest in Disney, and I wanted to go work for them. And I approached my parents thinking they would shoot it down right away. Like, you can’t move to Florida. You’re 18 years old. You’re not going to go do that. And they were like, yeah, go ahead. That’s great. I thought, all right, great. I got in the car with my dad. I had another budy that drove down, and we drove four days across the country to get to Orlando. And when you get down there, you go to a building. It’s called the casting center. And you go in there, and they just have whatever jobs are available right now. So I just went in, interviewed, and hadn’t actually heard back from them. My dad had to get home, so he flew home. I didn’t even have a job at the time. He’s like, well, I mean, I hope it works out. I’m like.

Peter Stevenson

So do I. Goodness.

Jason Johnson

So he flew back. I ended up working in Tomorrowland that summer at the Magic Kingdom, just as, like a merchandise host. It was like a simple entry level job. But I had done a lot of merchandise stuff before, and so I was really there just more for the experience. I didn’t necessarily care how much I was making. It was just kind of to learn about the culture and the company and things like that.

Peter Stevenson

And you were there with a buddy.

Jason Johnson

Yeah, I had a buddy. And coincidentally, he had worked for Disney, but he was a little more selective with what he wanted to do, and they didn’t really have what he wanted, so he ended up at he was at Universal, and I was at Disney. So I worked just for a summer. I had to get back for school and everything. So I came then. And then I also served a mission in France. So post mission, I came back, and then I went down several times again to Florida to work on what they call like, the college program. So they’ll come and they’ll do recruiting at Utah State. The U BYU UVU. So I went and did that in a couple different roles. So what I was trying to do was kind of like, broaden my understanding of the way the property. So, like, I worked at a resort one time at front desk to kind of understand how the resorts worked, not just the parks themselves. And then I went back two more times. So kind of my goal was to professionally was to work for Disney. I was like, I’m just going to find my area, and I’m going to kind of work into that and dedicate my time. So when I was doing my undergrad, I was trying a little bit more to understand kind of a broad variety of specialties, instead of being like, oh, I’m just focused on marketing or finance. It was a little bit more broad, which was great. I mean, I really enjoyed it. I learned a lot of interesting things. And then post graduation, I went down to Florida again on what was called an advanced internship with guest relations at the Magic Kingdom. So that was sort of like the jumping point for a lot of management. Like, people go through guest relations and then typically they get hired full time to be in management. It’s sort of the goal. And I got to that point the end of my internship, and they offered me and the other interns like, okay, you can go full time. And I kind of started to look around a little bit at my coworkers because, I mean, I had a huge variety of ages within guest relations, and there were people that were in the department that had been there 510 years longer than me, and they weren’t really making that much more than I was. And at this point I was like, I don’t know.

Peter Stevenson

What year was this?

Jason Johnson

So this would have been 2001, 2002.

Peter Stevenson

Okay.

Jason Johnson

So at that point I was like, well, I really love Disney and I love my experience, but I was like, I’m not going to dedicate five more years of my life to making $15 an hour, right? Because there are demanding hours when you’re working at the park. It’s like early mornings, late nights. You’re working pretty much all your holidays, weekend lagoon. Exactly. Like, lagoon is sort of the same. And so I kind of had to make a judgment call at that point. Like, what do I do? Do I stick with this? I’ve already invested a lot of time, or do I figure out what else is out there, like what I could do? So I kind of made the hard decision to just turn down the offer. I was like, okay, I’m not going to do that. And then I came back to Utah and just was like, I’m at Square. I mean, I’ve got some skills. I’ve done things, but I didn’t necessarily know professionally where I was going to go. Coincidentally, I had a really good friend who was at Utah State at the same time as me, and he did study graphic design. And as we were going through mean, I would spend a lot of time with him and he would be like, I got to work on homework. And I was like, oh, what’s your homework? He’s like, I got to do a CD cover for you too. I was like, what? It didn’t sound like homework to me. I was like, that’s cool, man. And so we would throw around ideas and he would show me what he was doing in Photoshop or Illustrator or whatnot. And I always thought it was really interesting, but it never occurred to me that maybe I should pursue that as career as a job. So when I got back to Utah, I was kind of trying to figure things out, and I remembered, oh, man, I really loved when we would have these sort of creative projects that he was doing. So I talked to him and just said, hey, what do I do? If I wanted to get into design or a creative field, where would I even start? And he’s like, Well, I would take a summer class at maybe Salt Lake Community College, just an Intro to Photoshop and see if you like it. He’s like, Because if you like it, great. You can go further. He’s like, if you don’t, you’ve only invested a couple hundred bucks a couple hours of your time. I was like, okay, sounds cool. So I did that, had a great time. The projects were all real simple, but it was really fun. It’s kind of this whole new world that I didn’t even like I didn’t know anything about Adobe products at that point. I was sort of like, I don’t know what this is. So it was really me and the people next to me, like, figuring out, how do you feather something? How do you do a blending mode? We had no of just it was a summer of just experimenting, really. So I got past that thought, okay, this is really fun, but now I’ve got to get some actual education and schooling because I didn’t have a portfolio. I didn’t really have anything to go on. So what I tried to do is I would just contact people at agencies, whether it was, like, designers or art directors or even if I could get a creative director. And I would try to just sit down with them and just ask them questions. What do I do? Where should I go to school? What do I need to study? What do you hire people for? And I was just kind of, like, trying to get as much information as I could out of them. So they kind of led down the route of, like, well, you could do, like, a grad school thing. You could go to a portfolio. Mean, you could do a four year degree. But I was kind of trying to go more of, like, kind of a condensed timeframe. I was like, I don’t want four more years of school. I had just finished four years of school, right? So through all of that, I kind of tested a few things and found an advertising program at Boston University, which, being an Ad program, it was only three semesters, so it was basically like, a year and a half program. So I got everything together for that. I had to study and take the GRE, which was awful, absolutely terrible, and I would never recommend it to anyone.

Peter Stevenson

They don’t even make people do that anymore, do they not no. Most places, like, none of that graduate COVID killed it all.

Jason Johnson

Oh, man. I studied for at least a year and my wife was like, I don’t know how many hours I put into that. And she’s like, probably just like, if he doesn’t pass, I don’t know what we’re going to do. Somehow I got into the program and it was great. The program was like I said, it was advertising focused. So you picked your track within that. It was either like, I’m going to be account focused or I’m going to be copywriter, or I’m going to be an art director. And you would get in and we would take a lot of basic intro classes to just advertising, advertising history, all that kind of stuff.

Alysha Smith

And you picked up and moved up.

Jason Johnson

Yeah. So we left Utah, moved. Oh, and also important side note, so my wife is a radiology tech, so she had a really good job. And when we got out to Boston, she actually had hospitals that kind of like fighting to have her come there. They were like trying to outbid each other, which we were like, this is great. They were like, well, what can we do to be like, okay, well, what’s your offer? So she was like playing like a free agent, which was cool. So we got out there, so she was able to work and she was in a totally different environment. She ended up at Boston Medical Center, which is massive trauma center out there. It’s like a huge campus, right? Yeah. So she was dealing with all kinds of interesting things at that hospital. They speak like, I don’t know, 40 or 50 languages because you get so many people just from all over the world. So anyway, she was having like a really interesting experience. And then in my program, I focus on art direction. But the program was cool because it was taught by professionals who had either been in the industry a really long time or were currently in the industry and would just teach as kind of like a part time adjunct. Type thing, which I thought was really helpful because they would come in and they obviously knew, like, okay, I’ve worked know I don’t know Mullen or they’ve worked at Arnold or one of these big agencies. And they’re like, look, this is the kind of stuff you’re going to need to know if you’re going to actually work in an agency. These are the kind of concepts you’re going to do. This is what you’re going to have to present to a creative director. This is how you get work approved. So we went through that whole thing of like, how do you present your work? How do you get people to buy off on ideas? How do you find good idea? That’s not just a print campaign. It’s more of like, okay, we could do outdoor, we could do nontraditional, we could do all these things. So that program was great. It was intense, pretty intense because of the timeline. So going through that program, I ended up partnering up with a fellow student of mine who was a copywriter. And we just decided that the workload in school isn’t going to be enough to get us ready to have a portfolio when we finish. We decided we needed to kind of work outside of just the regular assigned parameters. And so it was kind of interesting the way it worked out. We had a summer break in between, we had two semesters. So it was like fall, spring. Then we had a summer, which technically was off from school before the final semester in the fall. So when he and I went approach that summer, we both got internships at agencies, but we were also just working on campaigns. So we would get together, I don’t know, a few times a week and go like, okay, what do we want to do a campaign about? And so we would work on that. And then what was interesting is we would take that work to the creatives at these agencies and go like, is this any good? Is this garbage? Yeah. We would get their feedback, and they would give us all kinds of feedback, like, oh, I don’t know. This is weird. I don’t understand this. This doesn’t make sense, or whatever it was, we would get that feedback, and we would just keep finessing and finessing and trying to work on it. Or if it wasn’t just working, we would ditch it. Right? So we went through that whole summer process, and a lot of our fellow students just took the summer off. They’re like, I’m going to go to the beach, and I’m going to go do this. And I was like, Well, I mean, everyone does their own thing, but I was like, I feel the pressure that I’ve got to have a book ready to present to people in three months. So that process worked out really well for us. We really kind of honed in on that. And then so anyway, fast forward to graduation. Well, I guess I should say in between that we entered what’s called the Hatch Awards in Boston, which is basically their version of sort of like the Addies or like the Hundred show, right? Sort of like that kind of thing. Anyway, we ended up winning both times, which was amazing. It was like, great validation of like, oh, man, we put in the time for these campaigns and we got some validation from actual professionals.

Peter Stevenson

Right?

Alysha Smith

Can I ask about these campaigns? Were these existing companies that you were creating campaigns for? Did you make up these companies?

Jason Johnson

I think it was a combination of both. So I remember we did one for we picked a thing. It was called like it was like a kinder school or something like that for advanced kids. And we did all these things. Like one of the ads showed like an Etcher Sketch that they had done, you know, the famous painting The Scream or whatever it is. Like they had Etch a Sketched, The Scream. And it was like another one was like we took blocks, like just traditional blocks that they were doing equations out of blocks. So it was like, the idea, obviously the idea they’re a kid, but my gosh, he’s doing division with his blocks. You know what I mean? So that was, like, one of the campaigns. I honestly don’t remember if that was an existing school. It might have been a real school, but that was kind of the concept. We were like, okay, let’s do that. Another one that we won for was for a bottled water company called Poland Springs, which is really big out there. And that was kind of the idea. We had this campaign where there were, like, bottles of water that had fallen over in urban environments, but because the water was so fresh, there were trees and things growing in this desolate urban environment. So it was like, we did one on the top of a building where the bottle was, like, pouring, and then in New York, on the top of the building, there was, like, a forest grown from this water coming down. Anyway, so it was like a combination of both. In our actual classwork, typically, the professors would assign us, like, a real product. So one of those products was, like, Barkeeper’s Friend, and they’re like, how do you make basically, like, sink cleaner cool? You make that interesting, right? It’s like, oh, man, that’s like, okay, that’s a tough challenge. And another one that I remember was we had to work on small space ads. Of course, this was back when people read newspapers. They were like, you got to work on small space ads. And it was for these little custom Native American boxes that they would make that were in the New England region, were famous or something. And I was like, Gosh dang. Okay, how do we make that sound cool and look interesting? So the program was great because, like I said, they would really push you to do things like, you have to figure out small space, you have to figure out outdoor, you have to figure out nontraditional. It wasn’t just come up with a cool idea, and we’ll all shake hands. It’s great.

Alysha Smith

Real world.

Jason Johnson

Real world stuff. The other thing the program did, I guess two things that I thought were great was they brought in professionals to do these portfolio reviews. And they would do that. I feel like it was at least once a semester, but they would try to get people that were pretty high up again, and they would bring in people from both New York and Boston, maybe like some other, you know, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and you would just sit down with them, know, get feedback on your work. And that was pretty invaluable. So that was my first experience with portfolio reviews, but I just thought, these are, like, so good to go to a lucky opportunity. And it was like, I networked with these professionals and then some of them I kept in touch with for years and years. Even in my professional career, I would touch base with them or sometimes like, hey, I need some insight, I need some feedback. And they were all really cool about sharing, just, I don’t know, their thoughts, like, their experience and their wisdom, which I thought was great. The other thing that they did was they took us on a spring break trip down to New York. And that was the kind of thing where it was a little more limited. So you kind of had to almost, like, apply to be a part of it and you could apply to go down. And then when we went to New York, they had arranged for us to go to, I think it was around six agencies. And these were huge. This was like Ogilvy BBDO publissis. I mean, like massive shops. And when we would go inside, we would usually meet with alumni who were pretty high up, and they would bring decision makers, people that had been there a while, and that was really cool just to, again, get a perspective on like, oh, you want to work at Ogilvy? Well, this is like the bar. This is what you got to shoot for. So that was really cool. Even though I never ended up at a massive international shop, just having that experience, I think most creatives, I think, are intrigued about what other agencies look like. Yeah, even if I just walked through the hall, I wouldn’t even have to toggle. I’d be like, Dude, I go walk through BBDO in a second. Why wouldn’t I? 100% DDB. Yeah, sign me up. I’ll go be a janitor to look at the office. I don’t really care anyway. Yeah, I know that’s kind of like a long story, but it was a cool experience and being out on the East Coast, very different. Obviously, it was sort of like jumping into the a little bit of jumping into the frying pan, because going into that, I didn’t really have any experience in the creative industry. And all of a sudden it was like, here you go.

Peter Stevenson

So you come out of it after that semester, you now have experience, you now got a portfolio.

Alysha Smith

Connections.

Peter Stevenson

Yeah, connections. What was it that you wanted to do? Where did you go? What did you want to do for a career now?

Jason Johnson

So, yeah, my path, obviously was like, oh, I want to go do art direction somewhere. I didn’t necessarily think, like, it has to be this agency. It turned out that at the time when I graduated, this was right around basically like 2008.

Peter Stevenson

Yeah, rough time to get a job.

Jason Johnson

Creative industry was sort of like, disappearing. And in Boston in particular, like, Arnold was the big agency out there and they had had VW for a long time and VW had just basically parted ways with Arnold. So not only were there not jobs, there were like good creatives that were now being let go.

Alysha Smith

Campaign started going downhill.

Jason Johnson

Yeah, probably was because Arnold did some.

Alysha Smith

Really good yeah, very memorable.

Jason Johnson

Yeah. Really good stuff. Yeah.

Peter Stevenson

Early OTS was great for it was.

Jason Johnson

It was kind of a weird time. So not only did I feel intimidated, but I was like, now all these really good creative teams are being told, like, well, we just don’t have room for you. So Boston wasn’t really an and, but what I had kind of been recommended in grad school, which I thought was amazing advice, was they were like, when you graduate, you’re going to be tempted to go for whatever is going to pay you the most. Don’t go down that route. What you need to do is go somewhere that’s going to give you an opportunity to learn and be surrounded by really good mentors and creative people. And so that was kind of my thinking. Both me and my wife were on the same page. We knew that basically going into my first job, it was almost more of like an internship than it is a job. It’s kind of like you’re paying your dues to prove that you can hold it in the industry. So what we decided to do is we’re like, we’ll just open it up to going anywhere. It just needs to be a good opportunity. I don’t care what state it’s in necessarily or what city. It’s just like, we want to go somewhere where we can grow and kind of hopefully make a leap towards the next know. So I had applied to all kinds of different things. I don’t even remember how many, but a lot of them ended up applying for a junior position at an agency in Charleston, South Carolina called Hook. And they were great, showed interest, and they flew us down there, which was like the winter in Boston. So you get to Charleston in the winter and you’re like, I don’t care what they offer. I’m taking like, I’m going to take the offer because you’re like palm trees, beautiful weather. It was amazing. I was like, neither of us wanted to go back to Boston because it was so cold. Like the know, but small agency, very small, like boutique. I think there were like three main founders, copywriter and art director and actually the art director’s dad, who was like an industry veteran from Minneapolis, and he had worked at Fallon on all kinds of stuff, but he handled more the account side. He was just great. So he was sort of like the industry veteran there. And then we had a few other people that helped with production and finance and stuff like that. But the creative team at the time was literally two guys. So I came in as like the third guy, and it was just an opportunity to be surrounded by a lot of everything because being a boutique agency, they would get everything from packaging to apparel design to web design. We still did advertising. We would do a lot of nontraditional because a lot of the companies, I mean, they don’t have these big budgets, so it’s not like we’re doing outdoor, we’re doing more like guerrilla marketing, where I’m like, okay, well, what could we do in Charleston that’s really cool, that will get people’s attention? And so it was that kind of thing. And that was kind of where I was introduced really more to design, because going through my Grad program, obviously an art director designs, but it’s not really the same thing. And so prior to that, I was like, I’ve never designed a logo, I’ve never done branding for a company. But all of a sudden we would have like, a restaurant client and my creative director would be like, yeah, I need some logo ideas. Like, oh, okay, so just figuring it out just from the beginning, how’s that going to work? What are we building towards? We did a lot of restaurant branding, which was a lot of fun.

Peter Stevenson

Yeah.

Jason Johnson

And so that kind of opened me up to this whole world I didn’t really know of, of branding, and I was like, oh, this is fun. I really love creating an environment that now I can go to the opening of this restaurant. And it just feels like there’s so many little touch points that are just neat.

Peter Stevenson

So were you also doing interior spaces? Is this your first entrance into a whole bunch of other design that you didn’t really get a touch in school? Like, you talked about guerrilla marketing and you’re probably doing companies that are local to that area, right? So you’re walking into the place, you get to meet the owners, you’re like, oh, here’s a whole other idea about how you could be better that you just came up with on a know.

Jason Johnson

Like that kind of, yeah, yeah, a lot of our clientele was pretty local to that. Um, Charleston seems to have a lot of interesting entrepreneurs and just businesses going. Obviously, they’ve got a pretty big tourism base coming down from a lot of the East Coast. And so somehow we were just networked in with these restaurant groups and they were like, oh, now we got a new concept and we got another concept. And sometimes they’d come to us and be like, well, what should our concept be?

Peter Stevenson

Right?

Jason Johnson

So it was like a combination of both of those things. And like I said, there was just a lot of diversity between real estate companies and we would be helping with tech companies. We had a company that came to us called Twelve South and they design all kinds of items for Apple products. So like, cases, covers, stands, all kinds of stuff like that. So like, a totally different challenge to design for them. And then a lot of. Properties. So, like, high end apartment complexes or resorts or things.

Peter Stevenson

Those are the hardest brands.

Jason Johnson

They are tough, man. They’re tough.

Peter Stevenson

They’re so hard.

Jason Johnson

Real estate is tough, too, man. Yeah.

Peter Stevenson

So hard.

Jason Johnson

Really hard. In fact, when they got in with the real estate company down there, they really just had to kind of coach them through, like, how do we make you guys stand out? Because we’re talking, like, the signs that go outside, and we wanted to have headlines on them that were exciting. Not just for sale, almost like an ad inside, in your yard, you know what I mean? It was something like, imagine yourself here at dinner on the first night or something. You know what I mean? Something that’s more like evocative of a human emotion rather than just a number. Sure. But I remember to get them to that point was, like, such an uphill battle, right? Because in the industry, it’s just so put our picture in a big photo of the person, contact, info, end of story. That’s it. And I remember on their business cards the same thing. They really worked to make sure that they could stand out because their company was, like, green. It was, like, green and like a silver foil. So beautiful. Very well done. But no photos on them of realtors. Totally doesn’t sound revolutionary, but if you’ve worked in real estate, you know that’s, like, revolutionary. Yeah. Right?

Peter Stevenson

Yeah. So here’s my big question then. So what was the big eye opening thing, going from learning and theory to all of a sudden application, like, showing up every day doing a job? What did you learn that first year or two in South Carolina?

Jason Johnson

Well, I think attention to detail is one of the big things.

Peter Stevenson

Okay.

Jason Johnson

And we were fortunate enough to have a really incredible production manager, and she was just fantastic. I mean, I would go to her because I did a lot of collateral. I mean, back in the day, we would do tons of collateral. Companies would come in, and the first thing they would want was like, okay, I want the identity. And then immediately after that, it’s like, I need letterhead envelope and business card or invoice right. Everything.

Peter Stevenson

All that other stuff.

Jason Johnson

Yeah, the apparel and everything. So we were doing a lot of that. So I was really getting in the kind of the thick of, like, okay, stock, you know, coated, uncoated inks foils, like, you know, I mean, like, what, through their printer? Yeah, like all those kinds of little things. Like, oh, are we going to do edge painting? Like what, you know, what are some ways to make these things almost feel like a special little piece of art that you have? And so with her help, I would kind of get into the thick of that stuff, which I had never handled any of that in grad school, because when you’re designing an ad, you’re worried about the concept, and a lot of times bigger agencies might even hire someone to finalize the layout. You’re just like delivering this idea and then they’re like, oh, now this guy is going to handle or this girl is going to handle the actual production part of it. So you’re somewhat removed from that. But being at the agency, it’s like you’re hands on with all that stuff, all the little touch points, trying to figure out, oh, what are the techniques? They don’t have a lot of money. Do you do like rubber stamps in a cool way because they’re super cheap? Or do you do stickers or do you do one thing I always tried to do was letter press, and it always was shot down because they could never afford it. What’s the price?

Peter Stevenson

No, I mean, of course not.

Jason Johnson

I probably quoted that 20 times. I have no idea, and just could never happen. But to answer your question, I think it was just getting into the details of how do those things come to life in reality through production, and why is that important? Because there’s a difference. I mean, you know, when you feel something, you’re like just the tactile nature of it. You’re like, oh, it’s like a blind emboss. Oh man, that feels really special. That feels really unique.

Alysha Smith

At what point did it go from feeling overwhelming to have to manage all of these and to do the application rather than just the concept thing? When did it go from being overwhelming to really exciting? Or was it always really exciting?

Jason Johnson

I felt like it was exciting, but there were also I mean, obviously I had moments of trepidation where it’s like, I don’t know, and every creative screws up at some point. I remember I designed some it was like some massive wayfinding sign for this place called the Navy Yard, that it was an old actual Navy Yard in Charleston, but it had been kind of not used militarily for like, I don’t even know, years and years and years. It had become more of like a commercial property. And so this company was trying of turned it into like a mixed use facility. And I remember I had to design this massive thing, and I hadn’t really done it before and I can’t remember what I did, but somehow I screwed it up. It got produced and the company was like, this doesn’t look right. And my boss got involved and I was like, I don’t know. I thought I was doing what was right. And he’s like, well, you got to come ask me if you don’t know. And so I had one of those moments where I was like, oh man, I didn’t intentionally try to do that, but somehow I messed it up with what whatever I was doing. And so I had obviously some of those moments where it’s like, yeah, you screwed up. And luckily they were really understanding about it. They’re like, okay, everyone does it, let’s just not do it again, kind of thing. Exactly. It’s expensive. I think, like, most creatives would say, there’s moments in their career where you’re like, man, I probably should have asked for help. And I guess you learn that lesson where you’re like, if I don’t know how to do something, it’s okay to ask for help. And actually, it’s better to ask for help.

Alysha Smith

Yeah. Honestly, business Owner I would say, please ask before we go the wrong route.

Jason Johnson

Correct. So anyway, just one example. Gosh, that was probably 15 years ago, and I still remember that feeling of like, oh, man, I don’t know. I just screwed up.

Alysha Smith

Yeah, it happens.

Peter Stevenson

Okay, so you and your family moved South Carolina for the specific role rather than paycheck. At what point did you say, all right, I’m ready for the next challenge?

Jason Johnson

Yeah. So the way it transitioned was things were great there. Like, work wise, I think we were successful. We were covering new ground creatively all the time, which was awesome. It was actually a really hard decision to leave. It really came down to more of, like, the personal balance, because in the time since when we moved to Charleston to when we left, we had two young boys, and it just became really hard to kind of juggle the whole family work life balance kind of thing. And so at that point, we thought, okay, we probably need to come back west somewhere because both of our families were out here.

Peter Stevenson

Okay.

Jason Johnson

And so the way that I approached it was we were coming out to visit my wife’s family. They were in the Phoenix area. And I just thought, okay, well, if I’m going to be in town, I should go meet some agencies just to meet like, I’m not necessarily looking for a job, but I just want to network and see who’s doing good work. So what I did was I got online and I looked at their Addie Awards that’s their big award show and just looked at who was winning the awards, because I was like, I want to go where people are doing good work, work. And there were several agencies that I was like, okay, I would love to go talk to someone there, there. And I tried to just arrange meet and greets with them, like, real informal. So I ended up I think I met with, like, three agencies in Phoenix, and then I actually flew to New Mexico, to Albuquerque, and met with another one over there. They’re called Three Advertising, if you’re aware of them. But, man, they do killer work. Yeah. So long story short, I ended up meeting with an agency called Tunnel Bravo. It was super small, but, like, in the Addies, they had just cleaned house, and I was like, oh, cool. I want to go say hi to these guys. Ended up going and talking to them. I went prepared with a portfolio back then I actually printed my portfolio. So I had like a printed version that I took in there and I just thought I’ll just talk to them and if they are interested, I’ll show them some work. If not, no big deal. I’m not going to force it. I just wanted it to be more easy going and just went in, talked to them. They were like, oh yeah, I mean, curious, like most creatives, show us some of your work. So I just showed them some, said, hey, thanks, and just left. And it was kind of funny because the day after I flew to New Mexico and I get a phone call from them and they’re like, hey, if we were to offer you a job, how soon could you be here in Arizona? I was like, how soon are we talking? They’re like, I don’t know, it’s two weeks enough. I was like, I guess I own a home and I live, I don’t know, like three days drive away. Anyway, it was kind of a weird thing because they joked about it later that they were like, when you left we were like, does he want a job?

Peter Stevenson

You didn’t have an ass?

Jason Johnson

No, I didn’t like ask him. I just was like, I just wanted to meet you because you guys do good work. That’s it. I didn’t really have an ulterior motive. I just figured if I’m going to open doors, it’s like I need to meet someone. And then down the road if something happens, then they might think about you. You know what I mean? You just keep in touch with them like old school. And so yeah, that was just like a whirlwind. They were like, how soon can you be out here? So we got back to Charleston and just got everything figured out. My wife flew back to Arizona. Her mom came out and then they flew back to Arizona with the boys. Meanwhile, I packed everything up with my dad and we drove a know all the way across the country and it was insane. And then I ended up being there with Tunnel. Bravo for gosh. Man.

Peter Stevenson

This was 2010, 2011?

Jason Johnson

Yeah, right around ten 1112 like right around that time period.

Peter Stevenson

And what kind of work were they doing compared to what you were doing in South Carolina? Similar. Is it a design agency? Were you doing advertising? What is the work that they were doing?

Jason Johnson

Almost basically the same. Okay, like almost in so many ways, like a duplicate of they weren’t quite as networked into the restaurant branding type thing, but being again and they were even smaller than hook. I got there and I went in for my first day and it was me and two guys and I was like and I was like, I thought there was a third guy when I was here. And they’re like, yeah, we had to let him go to hire you. And I was like, what I was like, I didn’t know that. And they’re like, yeah, but it just wasn’t really working out anyways. And I was I mean, I felt pretty yeah. Being like, well, I didn’t realize it was like taking someone’s job. It ended up working out great. He got a good job and he was fine. But at the moment I was I mean, this is kind of not what I expected, but so there were literally three of us at the agency and.

Peter Stevenson

It was John and yeah, the two.

Jason Johnson

Guys who came so we’ll get to that. They’re the two guys who came to Qualtrics to start our in house team that I’m currently but so it was very similar. We were doing all kinds of stuff at the moment. When they hired me, they had just landed like a fishing lure company that we were doing. It’s called glow crazy. And I don’t even know if it’s around anymore. They had these lures that would actually they were sort of like bioluminescent almost. You put them down and they were like, the fish just can’t say no.

Peter Stevenson

Probably illegal.

Jason Johnson

It might be. I have no idea.

Peter Stevenson

It’s amazing. I want one.

Jason Johnson

And so we did this whole branding with this company called Glow Crazy. They were based out of Arizona, where it was, again, like soup to nuts. It was like the identity. And then it was coming up with collateral and then in store point of purchase, signage and that kind of stuff. But then I was even tasked with like, hey, we’re going to name this lure. What’s it going to be? And I was like, I don’t know. So I would go through the whole naming process and come up with combinations. And that was sort of like a new thing for me of like, oh, you’re going to name product now you’re going to brand the product and then you’re going to do the packaging. So it was kind of this really fast, again, education of something I didn’t really know much about.

Peter Stevenson

Can I ask a question? You’re clearly very successful at this design and creative thing. What do you think it is about your personality, your approach to it that has made you successful in doing this work?

Jason Johnson

I guess it would be hard to pinpoint one thing, but I think I’m just generally curious.

Alysha Smith

Yeah, actually I was going to say that about you.

Jason Johnson

And part of the curiosity is I think I really resonate with things that feel authentic and things that feel interesting. And that could be fishing lures, which I’ve fished, but I’m not really a fisherman.

Peter Stevenson

Right.

Jason Johnson

But I can still dive into that world and feel like this is really cool. How can we make this interesting along the lines of something else I might be doing? I don’t know. For instance, at Tunnel Bravo, we worked on a boutique for children’s clothing. I was like, I’m not really like, I wouldn’t say that. I’m passionate about children’s clothing generally, but it was a fun project to work on, and I could see the interest in that and kind of like learning and maybe that’s just a lot of creatives can relate to that. You get interested in different areas, and it’s easy to be like, oh, man, I could be totally involved in, I don’t know, this music festival, and that would be really cool, and you can jump to something else and be excited about that. So I’d say maybe curiosity is one of them, and then the other is kind of what we talked about earlier. I’d say maybe just like attention to detail. I think little things make a huge difference in design, whether it’s fashion or whether it’s anything traditional graphic design.

Peter Stevenson

Right.

Jason Johnson

I mean, even when you buy a car, there’s little details that you notice when you get in there that you’re like, oh, man, they didn’t have to do that, but they did it and they thought about it. And so I think I try to notice that when I’m around it, when I see those kinds of things, but also in ways if I can bring that into the types of things that I’m creating that I’m working on, because I think people resonate with that.

Peter Stevenson

So you land there three of you, and you’re doing primarily Arizona based stuff, right? Mostly local stuff, yeah. One of my favorite stories about you, and I’m going to kind of lead the witness here a little bit, but one of my favorite things that you talked about was you really leaned into finding ways to market your agency. You were the first person who kind of when I got into this space six, seven, eight years ago, we talked through what were some of those things that you did. So I’d love for you to talk through how you thought about making the small agency from Arizona start to land national projects. What were you doing?

Jason Johnson

Yeah, no, I mean, really good, mean teeny. I would even say that our presence in the Arizona market was very niche. Right. Like, there were certain people that knew us, but generally, if someone was a marketing director out there wouldn’t be like, oh, I’m going to go talk to them, because we were so small.

Peter Stevenson

Right.

Jason Johnson

So I’m talking like, I think our presence was within the creative community. But they’re not hiring you to do jobs. They’re your competition at the end of the day.

Peter Stevenson

Right.

Jason Johnson

So I kind of looked at it and just thought, like, I thought the work we were doing was good. And so I was like, I want to find ways to share it outside of maybe just award shows. Because again, with award shows, typically, who’s reading CA that’s a lot of designers know what I mean? Which is cool, and it’s great to get that feather in the hat. But I was like, there’s got to be other ways to get our work out there. So there were a couple of avenues. Like one that we went down was if, you know, under consideration, probably know them. So they had a really cool site for a long time called Art of the Menu, which was super cool because.

Peter Stevenson

I think it still exists, doesn’t it?

Jason Johnson

Well, I think they have the archive on there, but I know a few years ago they were like, oh, we’re kind of like, we’re not taking submissions anymore. That’s kind of not really a thing. But for a long time it was and it was really cool because you could just send your work to them and they would of course review it. And if they thought it was good, they would post it. And they have a massive following. And I think a lot of, for instance, like restaurant tours would go there and go like, oh, well, who’s doing cool stuff? So that was kind of where they could do their research. And I think that’s how we fell into doing restaurants in Arizona because we had, I don’t know, we would put stuff on there and then I would try to go out to, I don’t know, design blogs or just like places that were a little more maybe accessible. Yeah, I mean, they still definitely have a standard you had to pass to get your work on there. But I would try to say, like, okay, I’ll submit some work. And then I was invited to share posts every once in a while to go on there. Or I would try to get him in front of, like he’s called Mr. Cup now I’m trying to remember what anyways, French designer Fabian Burrell, and he’s got a huge following too. And so every once in a while I would send stuff to him and he would like post. So it was a little more like organic where I was trying to just get stuff out there. We would go on like ads of the world, which generally you put stuff on there, you just get ripped to shreds by all the, I don’t even know, creatives around the world. They just kill your work.

Alysha Smith

But is it good publicity is bad or bad publicity?

Jason Johnson

It could be one of those things where I would put stuff on there and just cringe. I’m like, man, what are they going to say? Just going to kill us. But at the same time, it’s like you got to sort of grow thick skin in some ways. And so I think it was more of almost like a scattered approach, like, okay, maybe I’ll try some stuff here. I’ll try some stuff here. And at the time, social media wasn’t really quite as big back then. So it’s not like you had your Instagram or any of that kind of stuff. So it was really more trying to put it in forums where maybe marketers or people looking to hire an agency would find it and then it just kind of went from there. We did one project down in Arizona. It was the first restaurant that we had ever done at Tunnel Bravo, and it was called the Arrogant Butcher. And it was interesting because the restaurant group we worked for is called Fox Restaurant Concepts. And they’re massive down in Arizona. But they came to us. I don’t even they somehow they probably saw something online somewhere. And they came to us and they were like, hey, have you guys done any restaurant branding? And my two bosses were like, they came to me and they’re like, hey, you did a ton of stuff in South Carolina. We need to show them that. And so we pulled together all the stuff we had done in South Carolina, and we’re like, yeah, this is, like, some stuff we’ve worked on. And they’re like, okay, good. Let’s do it. So then we got this first job, and we were like, we got to knock it out of the park. We’re just going to have to kill it. Knowing that this group could lead to a huge amount of other things, right? So anyway, we went to town on this thing. Man, I don’t even know how many names and logos and stuff we presented. We just went over the top. We were like, let’s just go, like, full board everything. And so we did that. Ended up getting it all bought off on. They allowed us to do all kinds of really cool stuff, like design the neon signage. We designed a mural on the exterior, and it got down to like, two days before the opening. And they come to us and they’re like, we haven’t been able to find a mural artist. Can you guys just paint it in a day? They’re like, we need it done, like, tomorrow. I mean, I’m not even kidding. That’s really the scenario. They’re like, we need it done, like tomorrow. We were like, okay. It was designed at that point, we had never painted a mural. So my two bosses were like, yeah, we’ll make it happen. We’ll figure it out. So not even joking. What we did was we had a big format printer. We ended up staying up. We printed everything out. You know, like traditional sign painters will put up their stencils, basically, like, their template printed out. We sat there with exactos, like, cut the whole thing out pretty much all night till, I don’t even know, like, four in the morning. Went and bought the paint, drove downtown Phoenix, painted all day, went home, cleaned up, went to the opening that night.

Alysha Smith

Holy.

Jason Johnson

Yeah, it was like the craziest day ever. But it was also super rewarding. We got there to the opening, I’m like, oh my gosh. And we took a picture with our mural that we had painted like 5 hours earlier.

Peter Stevenson

Right?

Jason Johnson

So that was kind of cool. So we kind of fell into these weird things, like the whole painting thing. None of us had ever done that before. And then all of a sudden that became a thing where we had other companies come and they were like, oh, that same company later was like, oh, we worked on another restaurant for them. And they were like, we need a mural. All of a sudden, we’re painting murals again. And it was just organic. We weren’t even looking for it. It was almost just like an accident kind of happened, which was cool because again, it was like a totally new way to express creativity that we had just not done before.

Peter Stevenson

Yeah, we’ve got to jump forward into your career. But I know that one of the things that doing some of that work led to was like starting to work with more know, taco Bell, I think, was one of your clients. And KFC and some of those clients started to call you because of the work you were doing locally and your promotion of that across the landscape. So I’m going to spill the beans. But you worked on Qualtrics logo and branding back in the day down in Arizona. And what year was that, that you guys did that design work?

Jason Johnson

So I think that was even like four years. That might have even been prior to me getting there. At the time, obviously, Qualtrics was quite small. But what they were doing is they would just hire agencies probably. I think it was just on know, like someone knew someone who’d done something well. They had somehow connected with Tunnel Bravo in Arizona. Tunnel Bravo had done their original branding. So, like, even the queue out on the wall, like kind of more like cursive queue, they did that stuff. And for years we would do kind of one off projects. Ryan would come and say, like, oh, we need to update our website, or we know a video or whatever it may be. And that kind of continued for quite a few years. We’d hear from Know, maybe every six months or a year, thing like that. And then at some point, Ryan flew both of John and Stuart. He flew them both up to Utah. And then I guess they were just like, hey, we need to get serious about having an in house team because we’re getting too big and we can’t support just an agency model. We need people that are in the company that really not only understand the brand, but sort of set the tone of the culture within the company. And so basically they worked out a deal. Those two came back and they were like, hey, Qualtrics is hiring us to basically buy our agency, and we’re going to go in house for them.

Alysha Smith

Are you in or out?

Jason Johnson

Well, no. I mean, at that point, it was like, we’ll give you a severance and like, good luck. I was like, okay, yeah, that kind of happened really quick too. But it ended up working out great. I ended up staying in Arizona for another year. I worked at another shop that was also very similar, doing packaging, branding, that kind of stuff. Meanwhile, they came up here and started to hire creatives. So they hired a film team. They hired copywriters, graphic designers, production manager, like, all that kind of stuff. And their goal was really just to have this sort of, like, boutique agency within the company that would just service all the needs that we had inside the company.

Peter Stevenson

Right.

Alysha Smith

Yeah, that kind of was a novel idea. Right. Were there other companies doing that sort of thing?

Jason Johnson

Man, I guess it’s kind of hard for me to say because honestly, my knowledge of the tech industry was pretty limited as far as how the in house nature of companies worked.

Peter Stevenson

Right.

Jason Johnson

There may have been others. I really don’t know. So this was like, nine years ago when they did that. I mean, they may have been kind of like at the beginning of that trend, maybe, of building in house teams. It’s certainly, like, obviously everywhere now.

Alysha Smith

Well, I guess, I mean, more of, like, buying and existing oh, an agency.

Jason Johnson

And bringing it in. Oh, yeah, that could have definitely been sort of like a new yeah, yeah. But Ryan kind of covers new ground all the time. Yeah, sort of on par. Right.

Peter Stevenson

So you end up coming up here a year later to work with them. What was that like? What was the transition from going from an agency that does work for lots of clients to working in house?

Jason Johnson

Yeah, they had to do a lot of convincing initially because they kept coming back every so often and would say, hey, we really need more people on our in house team. Are you open to it? Are you curious? And at the time, I was at another shop, and I was really enjoying what I was doing, still growing. I was doing a little bit more like associate creative directing. Like, I had several designers that were a little more junior that I was kind of helping out and mentoring and that kind of thing. So wing within just the department itself, there’s a perception and you guys probably know this, but there’s a perception that in house designers just aren’t quite as good as agency designers. And I think that that is pretty common, certainly common for me in the circles that I was in. People are like, oh, you’re in house.

Peter Stevenson

Couldn’t cut.

Jason Johnson

I’m not going to cut. I guess you couldn’t hack it. And so there was sort of this perception. And then I also was like, well, I don’t know. I mean, I’ve never worked for just one company. Am I just going to get bored? Generally, I want to do good work, but am I going to get to a point where I’m like, oh, man, it just kind of feels like we’re doing the same thing every year. It’s. Like rinse or repeat. So I really had to kind of mole all that around and see where things ended up. And it was the right decision to come up for, um, we ended up coming up because we didn’t really have any intention of making it back to Utah. We didn’t really have anything against Utah. We were just happy in Arizona. Our boys loved the weather down there. Oh, gosh, let’s see. That was like, eight years ago. So our oldest would have been, like, seven.

Alysha Smith

Okay.

Jason Johnson

So pretty know. And so we came up and just dove in. I mean, we were like, look, if we’re going to make a commitment and invest, we need to go all in and make sure that we do it the right way. And it was great. I mean, we were surrounded by good people, obviously. I’d worked with Stu and John, the creative directors, before, so that was, like, just a natural extension of what I had done before. But then it was like all these other new challenges and things, and with the company being where it was at and growing so fast, there were all kinds of new creative opportunities that I had never even experienced before. So one of those being, like, large events. Yeah. So originally we did Summit, which now is called X Four. But Summit originally for us was over at the Grand America, which was still a good sized event. We bring in several thousand people, and we would work as a team for, I don’t know, a number of months to put this thing together and work with other brands. We’d work with Volkswagen or we’d bring in Pandora or things like that. And so we’d be working with them too. And that was kind of new because I had never designed for an event before.

Peter Stevenson

Right.

Jason Johnson

So that size and scale, you’re kind of like and then also sometimes you’re kind of like, in the world of more like celebrities, you know what I mean? Like high profile people, whether it’s, like, the bands coming in or it’s, like the keynote speakers and things like that. So I hadn’t dealt with any celebrity type people in any of my previous stuff.

Peter Stevenson

Right.

Jason Johnson

So it’s kind of this new experience where you’re trying to figure out and that was just, like, one aspect. The other was like, they wanted all the office that we have to be unique and interesting. And so they tasked us with, like, well, how do we do that? How do we make them unique? So now I’m doing not interior design, but, like, environmental design. Yeah, it’s like the mural stuff. So all of a sudden, we’re doing mural stuff. We’re coming up with concepts that both reflect the culture of the company but also reflect the local sensitivity. So if it’s like, we’re doing something in Sydney, it’s very different than Seattle or Tokyo. And we’re trying to figure out what’s the perfect mix of Tokyo versus Qualtrics, like, where do they meet in the know? And you kind of have that flavor. So that was cool. I mean, it was interesting. So pretty quickly I found that I wasn’t getting bored. I was actually in areas that I hadn’t been before, which was great. Like a surprise.

Peter Stevenson

Yeah. So tell me what your life is like now. What are you doing at Qualtrics? What kind of stuff are you working on? The same kind of things. I know that you’ve had a title change recently. And what’s your life like lately?

Jason Johnson

It’s been pretty busy because we finished X Four, and this is going to sound like a while ago, but that was back in March. So our biggest event we do is in Salt Lake, but then we do international versions of that event. Okay, so post Salt Lake, the next big one we do is London, and then we follow that up with Sydney. And then this year, we actually had events in Paris, Tokyo, and those were the bigger ones, total global events. We had somewhere in the 25 to 30 range. So our team was supporting all of those events, even sometimes going on site. So one of the other designers went to London to help kind of just run generally, like, the look and feel of the event to make sure things were kind of put where they needed to be and making any last minute changes that they needed on site. So we’re just at the very tail end of that. And then, like I said, we’ve been working on a whole bunch of facility stuff. I just designed a mural for our Paris office that just got installed this last week. And then kind of on a side note, as if we don’t have enough to do, we decided we’re going to start a speaker series, and we’re going to have that during Design Week. And it’s called Sharpen the Saw. So we’re inviting three creatives to come in and speak in our in house theater. So we’re going to bring in Kevin Cantrell, Russ Gray, and Ryan Anderson, if you know those guys, all of them. So they’re going to come in because we wanted kind of like a wide perspective, like styles, techniques, like whatever. So they’re going to come in and do more of like a lightning 15 minutes, kind of like what we were talking about. Yeah, they’re going to come in and do that. So we’re kind of working on branding that whole thing and promoting that with Salt Lake Design Week. And then we also do these huge things every year called the Trends Reports. And basically they just go out and they survey people all over the world to find out what’s working for employees, what’s not working. It’s not necessarily like, Qualtric’s take on it. It’s just generally like, the pulse of what’s know out in the culture. And so our team was tasked with coming up with the art direction and the look and feel of these. They’re basically separate, kind of like I guess you think of it as, like, one campaign, but each one has sort of its own unique look and feel, whether it’s talking about consumers or employees or market researchers. So it’s kind of three campaigns in one, if that makes sense. Yeah, so we’re really, like, knee deep in all the art direction and execution on that stuff right now. And then X Four 2024 is, like, already in discussion. Figuring that stuff out.

Alysha Smith

Coming from an agency background that has influenced the way you approach work in an in house because you don’t want to be bored or it sounds like there’s just things that come up all the time that you’re innovating on or designing, do you think that’s inspired from your agency life, pre life?

Jason Johnson

Yeah. Yeah, definitely. One thing that we had talked about earlier that Alicia was telling me about our in our offices that we have globally, we have these I guess you’d call them like a social space. It’s not really like a restaurant, it’s not really like a bar. But they’ll come to us and say, hey, in Sydney, we really want a cool place for our employees to gather in the office. And a lot of times that’s like a full branding project for us. They’ll come to us, and either we’ll come up with names or they’ll propose a name, and then we just go through the whole thing. Like, let’s get artwork, let’s maybe go paint a mural. Let’s do custom glassware. Let’s do all these kind of little touch points. So I think that part is absolutely influenced by previous experience. The other thing that’s been interesting in Qualtrics is you really have the opportunity to look around and say, where could I do something neat as a designer? Because there’s needs everywhere that doesn’t ever end. I spend time on side projects forever and not do anything else. But within reason, we can look around and go, like, okay, in the provo office, is there an opportunity to do a really interesting piece of art on this wall, and then we can propose it and come up with the idea and just say, hey, if you guys are willing to back it, we’ll make it happen. Kind of like the speaker series we were talking.

Alysha Smith

Right?

Jason Johnson

That’s a total side project. Just as a team, I think. Just again, we’re curious, and I want to learn from those three people, too, but also to offer that to the community. So is there a way to do something that would benefit them and us together? And so we came up with this and just thought, well, we have the space for it. We might as well invite people and make it a thing. So we’re hoping that that becomes something that we do maybe, like, annually. Every year, we invite three new people, and ideally, I’d love to get people even from out of state. I would love to bring in creatives from all over just to say, hey, come in and inspire the local creative community. I mean, AIGA does that, right? Obviously. So it’s like in line with what they do. But I think we just felt like as a team, we could do something interesting and kind of lead out in that way. So that’s been really nice within the company. It’s not like I get a list and you don’t deviate from this. They’re like, you have a list of things to do, but do you see opportunities elsewhere? And how could you contribute to that, and how could other teammates contribute to that?

Alysha Smith

Keeps you from getting bored.

Jason Johnson

Yeah, exactly.

Alysha Smith

Just kind of one final question from me is if you could give a single piece of advice for maybe an aspiring designer or marketer that’s kind of interested in design, what would that be?

Jason Johnson

Probably a couple of things. I think the first thing would be, well, let’s see, because I’ve gotten a couple of the portfolio reviews recently, and then when I talk to the designers, I always tell them a couple of things. One is, I feel like when you’re working on your book, put some stuff in there that’s authentic to you. And what I mean by that is you have your classwork that you do. Right. Do something outside of your classwork. Because at the end of the day, a lot of students and we saw this in Arizona all the time, you could tell a student that was from ASU because you’re like, oh, you have that project, and you have that project, and it was just easy to spot. And it’s not like those projects weren’t done well, but it’s like, where’s your personality in this? You know what I mean? Because if you’re going to get a job, they’re hiring not only your portfolio, but they’re hiring you.

Alysha Smith

Absolutely.

Jason Johnson

And so I would say to anyone, like, getting going, it’s like, find something that’s interesting that will complement what you want to do as a designer. If it’s packaging, then package something really rad that’s authentic to what you love. The other thing that I always try to mention to students, I know we’re in the digital era, but I feel like a lot of the non digital stuff is the way to get in front of people.

Alysha Smith

Yeah, I love a tactile.

Jason Johnson

Exactly. So I’m like, look, if you really want to talk to a creative director, literally handwrite a note and send them, like, a couple of pieces of your work. Find an interesting way to do that. But it’s going to probably get in front of them because anytime you get mail in your hands or your assistant, I mean, you’re like a step closer if you email, like, you don’t know. I mean, so many of us have email that either gets filtered or there’s just so much that you just forget about it. And that’s easy to do. So I tell them it’s not like you should ditch that avenue. But I think at the same time, it’s a way to show again who you are, to show your personality and also to maybe you create a custom piece that’s just to get their attention. That’s like a mini ad about you. I’m like, that would be cool too.

Alysha Smith

Love that.

Jason Johnson

I think that’s what yeah, that’s what I’d recommend.

Peter Stevenson

All right, final question. We spent longer than normal in this one because it’s really good. So maybe give us a couple of places you would recommend people eat here in the valley, somewhere along from Logan all the way down to St. George.

Jason Johnson

Yeah. Two places came to mind when I was thinking about this one is Ernie’s.

Alysha Smith

You know that place, the one in Oram?

Jason Johnson

Yeah. Well, there’s actually there’s one in Provo, and there’s one in Orham.

Alysha Smith

Okay.

Jason Johnson

The one in oram is on Center Street. That’s the one we usually go to. Phenomenal. So good.

Peter Stevenson

The Zabrisky’s still hanging out there running that place.

Jason Johnson

It’s great. The sandwich that I always get is the Champ, which is a breakfast sandwich. It’s amazing. Yeah.

Peter Stevenson

So good, man.

Jason Johnson

I miss that. We need to go sometimes.

Peter Stevenson

Anytime.

Jason Johnson

Ernie’s is amazing. Like I said, they do have a provo. I think it’s just the two locations. I think there’s the provo and the Oram. But anyway, they’re phenomenal. And I think they have a food truck maybe.

Alysha Smith

I definitely drive by the Orum one frequently.

Jason Johnson

Yeah, it’s awesome.

Alysha Smith

Although I’ve never stopped in person.

Jason Johnson

I need to another local one that has been, I guess, kind of popular for our team recently is called Holy Taco.

Peter Stevenson

Okay.

Jason Johnson

If you’ve been over there no, so you would not find it if you didn’t know where it was. Kind of, like, hidden a little bit. It’s sort of over towards the University Mall. It’s only, like, I think, a block off of State Street. Like a block west of State Street. But if you ever get to go over there yeah, it’s in Oram.

Peter Stevenson

Okay.

Jason Johnson

It’s called holy taco. Really cool. Like, the design aesthetic is really rad. I think you’d probably like that. And very simple menu when you go in there.

Peter Stevenson

But like, traditional Mexican street tacos are know, juiced up.

Jason Johnson

Like, they’re all al pastor tacos that you get, and they’re yeah, they’re you know, if you’re wanting to go to or, if you’re in Oram again, try Holy Taco. They’re awesome.

Peter Stevenson

All right. Holy Taco and Ernie’s. Man, I definitely need an Ernie’s breakfast sandwich.

Jason Johnson

Yeah, it’s been a while for me too. They’re phenomenal.

Peter Stevenson

All right, well, hey, thank you so much. I really appreciate you being here, and good luck. We’ll see you around.

Jason Johnson

Thanks so much. Appreciate it. Thank you.

Peter Stevenson

Buy subjects is a production of modern eight agency and Silicon Slopes. Executive producers are Alicia Smith and Peter Stevenson. Editor and producer is Dave Meekum. Video production by Connor Mitchell development Production by Eric Dahl production Management by Shelby Sandland original music composed by Josh Johnson website designed by Modernate please make sure to follow and share the show with your friends and your enemies. Thanks for joining us.