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Creative
mastermind John C Jay moves seamlessly across
disciplines in an impossibly broad world of art and commerce,
excelling at just about everything he touches, from photography to
creative direction for music projects and urban revitalization.
This penchant for evolution and reinvention is part of what drives
him and keeps his ideas so remarkably fresh. One day he'll be
hanging out with Chinese beat-box musicians in Shanghai; the next
he's showing the Japanese architect Masamichi Katayama around
Portland in a caravan of pedicabs. Somehow he fits perfectly into
these worlds and countless others.
"Storytelling
is what I've always done," says Jay. "I feel like
I've come full circle."
That circle
encompasses a career that began in 1980 in the
menswear and home-furnishing departments of Bloomingdale's in New
York. "I had nothing relevant in my portfolio to impress them," he
recalls of how he got his first big break, which he landed despite
having no real experience in retail, fashion, advertising or
marketing. He won them over with his passion, but through his
talent and drive he moved up the ranks. During his 12 years at
Bloomie's he eventually became executive vice president, director
of marketing and creative services. In 1993 he took his brand
expertise to Wieden+Kennedy in Portland, where he has led
game-changing campaigns for Nike, established satellite offices in
Tokyo (1998), Shanghai (2003) and Delhi (2007), and is currently
partner and global executive creative director. He has even had the
enviable job of consulting with LucasArts on the global marketing
of two Star Wars prequels.
10
lessons for young designers:
1. Be authentic. The most
powerful asset you have
is your individuality, what makes you unique. It's time to stop
listening to others on what you should do.
2.
Work harder than anyone else and you will
always benefit from the effort.
3. Get off the computer and
connect with real
people and culture. Life is visceral.
Jay thinks and acts locally as well as
globally. With his wife,
Janet, he runs Studio J, an independent creative consultancy
located in Portland's Old Town/Chinatown, where they develop new
lifestyle concepts, products and experiences, from residences to
restaurants. One such development project is a floating home on the
Columbia River inspired by the Minka style of Japanese rural
architecture. Another is the James Beard Award-nominated restaurant
Ping, of which Studio J is part owner. "Studio J is trying to bring
a new vision and energy to the area," says Jay. "My goal is to help
shape a new creative corridor of this city based upon contemporary
Asian creativity and culture. So, if successful, my next
'adventure' is the creative direction of a full city block in
Chinatown."
If it seems as though Jay
is constantly working, then you have
the right impression. He has an almost limitless passion for
creating and delights in sharing his enthusiasm with others. For
the last 15 years, he has hosted art salons with the sole purpose
of bringing together artists of varied disciplines, from graphic
design to painting to journalism. He credits Diane Von Furstenberg,
whose now-legendary gatherings he attended in the 1980s in her
then-expansive Fifth Avenue apartment overlooking the Metropolitan
Museum in New York, with the perfection of the format. Of his
desire to bring creative people together, he says, "It has nothing
to do with making money… nothing to do with getting work. It's
about being a conduit for culture and information."
Jay thinks quite a bit about culture and
information, and
approaches branding with a prescience that has allowed him to
anticipate trends and tell people exactly the stories they want to
hear. For W+K Tokyo in 1999, Jay, tasked with creating new
basketball mythologies in a post-Michael Jordan world, turned to
Japanese hip-hop, a genre that was then finding its voice and
beginning to embrace its own cultural relevance. Jay saw a chance
to tell the compelling stories of three new athletes Kevin Garnett,
Tim Duncan and Jason "White Chocolate" Williams through the prism
of that musical genre and lifestyle. The campaign included a
limited-edition vinyl release called Player's Delight (a
riff on "Rapper's Delight" by Sugarhill Gang) and gave rise to W+K
Tokyo Lab, an audiovisual label. One of the most successful acts to
be launched under Jay's creative direction has been the break-beat
trio Hifana, now on its third album.
4.
Constantly improve your craft. Make things
with your hands. Innovation in thinking is not enough.
5.
Travel as much as you can. It is a humbling
and inspiring experience to learn just how much you don't know.
6.
Being original is still king, especially in
this tech-driven, group-grope world.
7. Try not to work for stupid
people or you'll
soon become one of them.
Not
only does he know which story to tell, but Jay also has an
uncanny ability of knowing how and when to tell it. His work for
Nike at Wieden+Kennedy contributed to Advertising Age's
naming the company "Marketer of the Year" in 1996. By 1997 Nike
sales had swelled to $9.2 billion; at the same time Jay was
cultivating an antiestablishment identity for the athletic brand
with a campaign centered on street basketball and captured in an
award-winning book, Soul of the Game.
One of the traits that make Jay unique in
the advertising world
is his genuine appreciation of the opportunities his success has
created, perhaps because he didn't always have them. The first
child of Chinese immigrants living in Columbus, Ohio, Jay grew up
sharing one large backroom at his parents' business, a laundry. He
picked up his first English words by watching car commercials on
television. He would stand on a corner downtown watching traffic,
"spotting the cars, matching their shapes to the commercials and
practicing the 'sound' of their logo," he says.
More than once, he got in trouble with his
parents for drawing
on their walls. Those early drawings often depicted the toys he
wished he owned—robots, space guns, airplanes—and the Art Deco
LeVeque Tower, then Columbus' tallest building. The prolific young
artist even entered a drawing contest in the back of a comic book.
"To my surprise, a contest representative came to the laundry to
see my parents and praise my 'gift' as an artist," Jay recalls. "He
was simply a salesman, and my parents couldn't afford the lessons
anyway. That was maybe the very first thought I had about being an
artist. It was positive reinforcement of the most primal kind."
All of it—the drawing, the early obsessions
with cars,
architecture and toy space guns—might have led him to a career in
industrial design had Jay and his family known that such a path
existed. It wasn't until he was a student at Ohio State University
that a friend suggested he take a course in visual communications.
Soon he was devouring European design magazines in the university
library. "It was startlingly new," says Jay, and he knew he was
finally in his element. Although his new calling was initially a
tough sell with his (eventually supportive) parents, Jay graduated
from OSU in 1971 with a visual communications degree.
8. Instinct and intuition are
all-powerful.
Learn to trust them.
9. The Golden Rule actually
works. Do good.
10. If all else fails, No. 2
is the greatest
competitive advantage of any career.
Ever since then, he has been helping to
reshape the world
through design. He remains grateful to the friend at OSU who
pointed him in the right direction, and to his mother and father,
in whose names he recently established an art and design
scholarship for students of Asian descent at his alma mater.
When asked about important lessons from
design, he says, "We
learn to have more empathy for other cultures and ideas. We learn
that collaboration is a powerful way to solve problems." Jay is
continually actualizing those lessons in his work. In October 2009
Studio J organized an exhibition of contemporary Chinese design,
"The Jelly Generation," in the Old Town neighborhood. And in late
2009 he and hotelier Alex Calderwood co-edited and
creative-directed an issue of Arkitip magazine celebrating,
of all things, great collaborations.
How
does he sustain all of this constant self-reinvention? "It's
still fun. That's why I work so hard," says Jay. "When work and
play are inseparable, that's the goal. That's what we're all
striving for."
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