JD GARGANO · CREATIVE DIRECTOR · SYSTEMS THINKER · ILLUSTRATOR
Closing that gap is the job: making complicated things look inevitable. Fifteen years of it across broadcast, brand, and digital, picking up awards along the way, and a live SaaS product shipped this year.
Each one started as somebody's version of your problem. The first is live today, go poke it.
Whatnot sellers lose sales to dead air, the silence while they dig through boxes mid-stream. Caddie puts their inventory on the stream as a live, searchable overlay so the show keeps moving. Designed, branded, and built solo, from first sketch to paying subscribers in a matter of weeks.
Soundless video ads engineered for 30 seconds of undivided attention. Motion built for elevator screens, no audio, no skip button, no escape route.
Print, presentation, and trade show design for a distributed ledger technology firm. Clear, credible visual language for a product most people find opaque.
Show opens, promos, and on-air brand identity for a top-10 market broadcast station. Multiple Emmy and ProMaxBDA Awards came out of this run.
In A Maze is a passion project that's going on 35 years. Hand-drawn works, shown at NFT NYC and collected internationally. Not a side project, the discipline that runs underneath everything else. A maze is a system built so a stranger can find their way through it. So is your brand, your product, and every element you put in front of a customer.
If your creative team is stuck at capacity, the fix is usually the machine around them, not the people. Redesigning that machine has been half the job for a decade. Numbers first, tools second.
Publishers Clearing House, through workflow automation and process redesign. No additional headcount.
Captivate Network. Same team size, better systems, more work shipped.
Captivate Studio. Creative quality and operational reliability compounding together.
Maker first.
I've spent 15 years building creative departments and directing the work that comes out of them, and before that I was an animator, and before that a graphic designer. The instincts were trained on deadline television and they've never relaxed.
I helped build and shape both Tribune Creative Group East as well as Captivate Studio from the ground up, hired the team, set the creative direction, and built the operational infrastructure around it. Before Captivate I was at WPIX directing on-air brand identity for a top-10 market station. Several top awards came out of that period, and they still matter.
School of Visual Arts, BFA in Graphic Design and Motion Graphics. These days the sketchbook and the terminal sit on the same desk, and Caddie is what happens when they talk to each other.
Available for remote Creative Director roles. If your company sits where creative direction meets technology and systems thinking, and your brand has a real point of view, we should talk.
RÉSUMÉ ON REQUEST, SAME EMAIL ADDRESS.