Today we’d like to introduce you to JD and Ellie Jordan.
JD Jordan is a veteran visual and UX designer with experience as a creative director and a consultant with some of the biggest agencies and brands in the ATL and beyond. He is an award-winning graphic designer, design educator, public speaker, and historian. He is currently the design director and co-founder of the design and content agency, J+E Creative.
JD taught UX design at General Assembly, Creative Circus, and The Atlanta College of Art. He’s designed online and app experiences for The Atlanta Opera, AT&T, Cox, IHG, The Home Depot, The Magnificent Mile Association, Open Hand Atlanta, and numerous startups and higher-ed institutions.
He is also the author of the acclaimed sci-fi-western novel, Calamity: Being an Account of Calamity Jane and Her Gunslinging Green Man (Heliosphere, 2016)—and has also been featured in Creative Loafing, The International Journal of the Book, Newsweek, Paste, and Smashing Magazine. He is represented by The Zack Company and is currently working on a hard sci-fi novel and a follow-up to Calamity.
Ellie Jordan is an accomplished model and actress who has worked on both sides of the camera with leading photographers, artists, directors, and designers in New York City and the Southeast. Ellie loves managing creative teams, both in Atlanta’s booming film community and for agile technology projects.
Ellie has experience working with creative teams at large fortune 500s—like Coca-Cola’s Coke Studio and Cox Business—and with startups. As part of the Atlanta film community, Ellie has experience working with Adult Swim, Anchorman, Logan Lucky, The Walking Dead, and X-Men.
THE STORY:
We met in an Atlanta Writer’s Club critique group and quickly became fast friends. We married in secret in 2014 (since, like divorces, we couldn’t yet afford the wedding we wanted), blending our families (five kiddos—4 boys and one girl—two dogs and a cat) into one household.
But the big turn came in 2016. Ellie and I got married (the first wedding at ASW Distillery), my debut novel, Calamity, hit e-readers and bookshelves, and crisis struck frighteningly close to home. Ellie had recently had an outpatient procedure to close a hole between the atriums of her heart—something 25% of people have. Unfortunately, when the doctors threaded the PFO closure device into her heart, they nicked her aorta.
Five weeks after her procedure, while at a happy hour at General Assembly—where I taught the full-time UX design program—her aorta exploded, crushing her heart as her pericardium flooded with 1.5 liters of blood. She was rushed to the Grady ER and into emergency open heart surgery. Otherwise young and in otherwise excellent health, Ellie survived and spent a week in ICU before coming home and starting the long journey of recovery.
It made us really sit back and assess where we are as a couple, as a family, and as creative professionals. Time is short, health and youth are fleeting, and no one else is going to prioritize our family and our passions if we don’t.
So Ellie and I started J+E Creative. We’d been doing some design consulting on the side for a while, but in late 2016, we went full-time. We’re using our design thinking and media talents to work together, and with good people, we trust to do good work. And to create a company that challenges us explores new ways to do creative work and takes our little clan of Jellies to the next level.
J+E is an experience and content agency that gets important shit done for clients large and small. And we do it with empathy. Not just because we should be nice to people but because knowing how our users feel and knowing what they need makes us better designers. And because knowing what’s important to our clients makes us better partners.
If you’re looking for a partner, who will tell it like it is and hold your project as close to their heart as you do, give us a try. We won’t bullshit you or push off-the-shelf solutions your way just because they’re easier or to make a margin. We’ll work with you and your users to figure out what you need and how to make that happen. And we have fun doing it.
Then, exactly one year after Ellie’s surgery, I was discovered to have stage 3 colon cancer.
Over the course of the previous year. We’d grown the company to five people, but with the rapid application of chemo and surgeries, we struggled to keep our momentum. But we made it. There’s so much more I could say… give me a ring at 678.230.9810 if you want more details…
Has it been a smooth road?
As divorcee small business owners, we’ve been denied credit and payroll loans because our business is young and we have damaged credit. We’ve been denied insurance because we’re married—we had to hire our first FTE in order to get insurance!
We’ve been denied business insurance because we did work for an LGBTQ dating start-up and we lost a contract with a local fortune 100 company because my Emory oncology team prescribed medical marijuana to help treat my cancer.
But we’ve made it (so far). We do good work, work with good people, and love working together. We even recently filmed our first short film—with local director Donny Hamrick—and I just published another short.
So, as you know, we’re impressed with J+E Creative – tell our readers more, for example, what you’re most proud of as a company and what sets you apart from others.
J+E is an experience and content agency that gets important shit done for clients large and small. We provide a full range of creative services, from business analysis and user research all the way to high-fidelity visual design and front-end development.
At J+E, we think the iterative design process doesn’t need any additional adjectives.
Experience, graphic, service, broadcast—our user-centered and research-driven approach is channel agnostic when it comes to identifying, refining, and delivering creative solutions. We also believe in pairing the right team with the right client.
We intentionally maintain a small leadership team and scale our creative team to match the specifics of your project—that is, we determine what you need and only then choose the very best people in our network to design and execute your solution.
This year, Clutch named J+E Creative the top UX agency in Atlanta! We also placed in the top five for video production as well as for digital and graphic design!
Key clients: AT&T, The Atlanta Writers Club, The Barnes Firm, Block + Tackle, Care International, Coca-Cola, Cox Business, Hatchworks, Love + Logic, Open Hand Atlanta, Post-Office Co-Working, Trapollo
Our four service areas are:
-Design thinking: We don’t think the iterative design process needs any additional adjectives. Experience, graphic, service, broadcast—our user-centered and research-driven approach is channel agnostic when it comes to identifying, refining, and delivering creative solutions.
-Media & content: We’re passionate about storytelling—on paper, on film, in pixels, and in person—and about the media strategy that shapes content for your users. From copywriting to editing, production to direction, we love getting our hands dirty bringing your stories to life.
-Design unicorns: Let our talented, veteran design unicorns join your squad for a short workshop, some hands-on coaching, a half-day team activity, or a week-long design sprint. We’ll use design-thinking to get something researched, designed, and tested—fast. And teach you how to do it.
-The best damn pies: The best relationships between clients and designers are just like the best relationships between friends: based on mutual respect, good times, and good food. Seriously—our delicious handmade pies are the best. And they’re just for clients.
Let’s touch on your thoughts about our city – what do you like the most and least?
I love ATL. I’ve been here since I was 9 (went to Holy Innocent’s for high school and UGA for grad school) and love how cultural, artistic, progressive, and diverse the metro area is. The creative class in this town is amazing.
Ellie is a transplant from Washington and NYC, but we love raising our kids here! We’ve been fortunate to live and work all over town—Sandy Springs, Dunwoody, Roswell, Decatur, Midtown, Brookhaven, Buckhead, and Downtown.
Pricing:
- We offer a 1-week commitment from a 2-3 person design team—fully dedicated!—for $15k. Details can be found at http://www.importantshit.co/unicorns
Contact Info:
- Website: importantshit.co
- Phone: 678.230.9810
- Email: j@importantshit.co
- Instagram: http://instagram.com/importantshit.co/
Getting in touch: VoyageATL is built on recommendations from the community; it’s how we uncover hidden gems, so if you know someone who deserves recognition please let us know here.
