I am an artist and designer, working primarily in the entertainment and advertising industries. For over fifteen years now, I’ve worked on projects within video games, feature films, advertising and graphic novels. At heart, my passion is for designing worlds, environments, user-interface design, and other visually-related projects such as interactive apps, games and films. My calling is to help make ideas visually clear and interesting, and to provide others with a sense of place through designing places and experiences that are inviting and immersive.
Some of the projects I’ve worked on throughout my career include Call of Duty : Finest Hour with Spark Unlimited, Mystery Case Files: Dire Grove with Timbuk2 Studios & Big Fish Games, and several comic book titles with Image Comics and Marvel including titles such as Captain America, Youngblood and others. Currently, I am working with Timbuk2 Studios on an unannounced project, designing and developing environments and user-interface (UI) design, as well as a few other projects.
About the Blog
In addition to design, I also enjoy production development and putting in place pipelines which help creative teams be productive and successful. Beyond providing a way for me to share the projects that I work on, this blog exists as an outlet for discussing topics related to both design and developing effective methods for designing effective productions. My personal conviction is that productions run well when they’re not only fun to be a part of, but when the teams behind them are also led well, given the right tools, and provided with a solid vision for what they are setting out to accomplish. After years of working within production-oriented projects and discovering methods which work well (in addition to those which do not!), my desire is to simply provide a place here where these areas can be evaluated and learned from.
My Biography
My career began in the mid-nineties with a new company in the comic book industry at the time – Image Comics. While at Image, I worked as a Color Artist with Extreme Studios and had the opportunity of working on several great projects such as Youngblood™, Captain America™, The Avengers™ , Supreme™, and Prophet™.
After Image, I spent a few years in advertising and feature film and was then given the opportunity to join a new start-up team in 2002 in the interactive game industry with Spark Unlimited where I helped design and develop environments for the team’s first project: Call of Duty™: Finest Hour™ . Since then, I’ve worked on other game projects including Legendary™, Turning Point™: Fall of Liberty™, Global Agenda™, and Mystery Case Files: Dire Grove, in addition to a couple of other upcoming unannounced titles.
After spending most of my life in Orange County, Southern California, I moved to Atlanta, Georgia in 2006 where I now live with my wife, Heather and two children, Skylar and Ashley.
I’m currently working on production for an up and coming, unannounced casual game and production design for a personal project – a 3D Animated short film (website and announcement forthcoming). I’ve also had the recent opportunity of being one of the contributing authors in the newly published Teaching, Seeing, and Writing 4 from Bedford-St. Martins, published in 2010. In ‘Teaching’, I discuss the importance of understanding how the surroundings from the real world impact the way we stage the virtual world and conversely, how the virtual world is now impacting the real world!
My Contact Information
If you would like to get in touch with me, please feel free to email me at jvoeltner@gmail.com. I’m also on Twitter!
