jerre teague

Overview

I am guilty, in my personal creative life, of having too many interests. I paint, I draw, I play music, and engage in parody and comedy. Creativity is the disruptor of the mundane. It is the harnessing of the human spirit and orator of its struggle. I enjoy making things, showing things and consuming the reaction. This spirit translates into my professional world in almost every way.

Coupled with this, is the facination with patterns, how the eyes move, what stimulates the ear and what can subtly nudge others into desired actions or reactions. I spent some of my time in college, studying anthropology and psychology in order to learn more about what makes people tick and how to do things with that knowledge. Naturally, this lead to User Experience as a career choice. There is no other field that allows one to exercise both the Right and Left Brain modes simulatenously, quite like UX.

Like my work, I am a bundle of kinetic and creative energy, waiting to be unleashed.

Canvas

While studying Graphic Communications at the University of Houston, I ran the Small Projects Gallery for 2 years. During this time I painted and showed works and spent 2 years in the Studio Block Program. This program only admitted 10 painters a year for a 2 year program. During this time my styles fluxuated back and forth from the Figurative Surrealism, Abstract Surrealism and what would later be called Subjectivism.

The hyper kinetic nature of this work is in stark contrast to the principles of my profession. But, in some way, their complexity and chaos are a mirror to the world I am trying to design away from, for my users. I perceive the chaos around me as a pattern. These patterns in life can be either captured in paint, or recognized in a clean work flow that negates these distractions.

Paper

Much of my work begins as a doodle, or stream of consciouness sketch. There was a period of my art where I would refuse to plan a drawing, or even start with a basic idea. But the product in the end seemed as if it was planned from inception. In reality, I was playing with the concept of randomness that turns into order. If one starts off rolling dice and plotting the results on a graph, the pattern seems random at first. However, over time and increasing number of rolls, the plots invariably form a pattern. This is a concept that has tickled the core of my being. By disconnecting from meaning and intent (as much as possible), I would remove the parts of the paper that seemed to hide complex shapes and incomprehensible patterns.

With other drawings, I continued my efforts within Surrealism and Subjectivism. And while in college, I published a daily comic strip for the university paper for nearly 2 years. Below are some samples of the various styles and techniques I dabbled in.

Audio

As a creative, I have always been attracted to ways that express these drives. One of the early methods I found was music. Through my love of technology and desire to learn a new creative medium, I began a path that would take me literally across the globe at one point. Music and sound have always been intertwined in my creative process, so it was only natural I would begin to explore actually creating it. Later, as my abilities and gear collection grew, I even found ways to bring this into my professional life.

Below are a few samples of both the music scoring abilities, and interaction cues that can be created through sound.