So I real­ize I haven’t yet writ­ten an actual per­sonal blog about me yet, mostly just movies and design stuff, so here’s my offi­cial update to the world:

• I am offi­cially now work­ing for a won­der­ful large com­pany doing graphic design, I of course won’t post their name on here, but thought it would be nice to say I have an offi­cial full-time job doing what I love. No more temp/freelance work to make a liv­ing, I can actu­ally start feel­ing com­fort­able about plan­ning for the future. 
• I am get­ting mar­ried on Octo­ber 11^th to the love of my life. She and I have been together for almost 4 years, and have had many won­der­ful adven­tures includ­ing going to Italy and France, Hawaii sev­eral times (her home) and soon we’ll be mak­ing a trek down to San Fran­cisco for our hon­ey­moon. If you’d like more info about our wed­ding go to our wed­ding web­site Alli­son Loves Jared Dot Com. 
• I finally have a won­der­ful new com­puter set-up with a 20″ iMac with 500GB Hard Drive, 4 Gigs of Ram and a 1TB Time Cap­sule for all my back­ing up glory. This may not seem that great, but Alli­son and I have liv­ing off of a Mac­Book for far too long with way too much music and pho­tos (about 50 Gigs total) and not enough space. Hav­ing all of our con­tent on our com­puter and not hav­ing to plug in an exter­nal hard drive every time we wanted to look at our pho­tos or lis­ten to music is a huge relief. More on my Apple love later.
• My birth­day is next Tues­day (August 26) and I’m going to be 23. A lot has hap­pened in the last 4–5 years that have really changed who I am and where I’m going in life, and it’s always inter­est­ing to be a year older and real­ize how dif­fer­ent you are and what’s hap­pened since your last birth­day. It’s prob­a­bly best not to think about this too much, but I can cer­tainly say the last year of my life a lot of really great stuff has happened. 
• For a while now I’ve been sup­ple­ment­ing my income by doing design work under my free­lance moniker Jared Pen­der­graft Designs, it’s worked pretty well and I’ve been able to get a decent amount of extra income work­ing with clients I’ve met along the way. A friend of mine had recently con­tacted me with the idea of start­ing a new media group focus­ing the tal­ents and ambi­tions of sev­eral peo­ple to work in a cre­ative col­lec­tive. I’ve been a big fan of this idea for quite some­time and I’m really glad my friend brought it up. Not only do I think design­ers typ­i­cally aren’t good at mar­ket­ing, but they also shouldn’t be spend­ing a ton of their time not-designing. By using a collective’s tal­ent you can get more clients, do more work, and focus on bet­ter design (at least if you’re a designer). I’ll keep up to date when more develops.