Begin Again

Whenever I need a quick pick-me-up, this snippet from Sam Harris seems to do the trick. Here’s my flawed attempt at transcribing it:


The whole point of life is not to arrive, but to begin again.

Because everything you’ve done, or not done, is now just a memory.

And everything you are telling yourself about the future, is a half-truth at best.

Because however good or bad things seem: nothing lasts.

Because there’s so much more to life than talking to yourself, about yourself.

Because this moment, is wide open. The world itself, is wide open.

And no one knows how good life can be.

Because in this moment, there’s always an opportunity, to stop looking over your own shoulder.

In this, living instance, and only here, this is where you can lose the mask that you’ve mistaken for your own face.

This next moment it’s truly new and totally unexplored,

And that’s always the case.

So, wherever you’ve come from, however hard things have seem, whoever is in your life, and no longer in it.

Whatever has been done, or left undone,

Just begin again…

2018 NYCFC Featured Collages

For this years’ Matchday newsletters we featured a different player for every game, 34 total. I got inspired by the black and white collages on this article by Goal.com (great read btw!) and recruited Patricio Cuvi to help me with a lot of the Photoshop magic. They looked pretty awesome on the newsletters but since they were so small thought it would be fun to make some posters out of them.

A big shout out to Project Director Janine Padilla!

It’s my first time doing this download thing. Please shoot me a message on Twitter at @jupago if any of the links doesn’t work.

Overview NYCFC 2016 Season


Client: New York City Football Club
Project Manager: Janine Padilla


New York City Football Club (NYCFC) just wrapped up their much improved-tough ending included-second season. I’m one of thousands of New Yorkers that come from places where soccer is king, so, when we found out the new team in town would be playing in a baseball stadium, we threw a privilege tantrum, then remembered the reason we love this soccer thing is because we get to play it anywhere from dirt to cement, using whatever object we can use a soccer ball.

This was my second season as a fan in the supporters section. It has been a blast watching the team grow and create its own identity. There are the ongoing struggles, like the very confused stadium staff by the energy of a 90-min game compared to a 4-hr pass time; The weird season schedule; and the efforts to get the mix of classic Latin American, European, AND new chants going, but hey! if there’s one thing this city is about–besides letting Mike Pence know what we think of him–is that we are the coolest melting pot in the world.

Me hitting those high notes.

This was also my second season working with the club on a few things throughout the season:

SEASON EMAILS

Under the direction of Janine Padilla, designed and built a set of responsive emails for the different campaigns. The goal was to make the code a lot leaner from the previous season (gmail would often clip them because of their size), make them uniform, easy to edit, and targeted to NYCFC’s local and international supporters.

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What I learned:

Litmus is a lifesaver, there are 50+ email clients out there and Litmus has, by far, the fastest and easiest way to test/preview them.

Screenshot of Litmus Email Clients settings
Screenshot of Litmus Email Clients settings

Dan Denney gave me a bunch of great tips at Squares. One of them is to use this handy Bulletproof email buttons generator. Reliable & and huge time saver!

– Gmail joining the responsive game means it is a good time to stop sending 700px+ wide emails!

If you know some CSS then you can quickly learn @media queries. Here’s is a quick (a bit dirty) simplified version of a responsive email.

See the Pen Simple Responsive Email by Juan Pablo (@jupago) on CodePen.

NYCFC GRAPHICS

Worked on a mix of different graphics for emails/website/sponsors/social media campaigns. These are fun to do. Mostly because of the size restrictions ad and email vendors provide.

A thing about size… I’m leaving a lot of images out because the page is already a bit heavy. The website is set to serve you a smaller, responsive image if you are on a mobile device. Also imageoptim!! It will reduce the size of your images significantly. Can’t recommend it enough!

*Huge thanks again to Janine for creative direction and Milo Kowalski (NYCFC’s designer) for the styleguides and those time consuming silos!