Self portrait (by verybigjen)Professional:
Jen Segrest is a graphic and web designer in the Dayton/Cincinnati Ohio area and blogging on Very Big Blog since February 2002. (Which makes her Old Skool! Yo!) She's an unrepentant a Mac user.

Jen has garnered much attention from her web design but also for print. In 1998 won the esteemed Gold Industrial Design Excellence Award from the IDSA (It's the Oscars of ID design) for a user manual for Crown Lift. She's done web work for Formica, Mercedes, Provident bank and many others. She us currently the designer for Artfire.com

Pixels:
As well as web design, Jen is a mid century modern pattern designer with her site PixelDecor.com. Her work that appears on various home decor and iPod products as well self-titled scrapbook paper line. (And she guesses 1,002,756 MySpace pages.)

Passions:
In 2004 her freakish devotion to Swedish furnishings powerhouse IKEA, and frustration at Ohio's lack of one, led her to start (based on a rumor they were looking at locations in the state) Flatpackohio (formerly ohikea); a blog for rumor tracking the eventual store's arrival. In August 2006, as cited by her predictions, the announcement was made for a store near her house north of Cincinnati (Totally called it!). She and her blog have been featured in Cincinnati Magazine, Business Week Magazine and nearly every major paper in Ohio, and places beyond. Now that the rumors are over the blog will be covering the construction and opening. She finds rumor mongering is way more fun. She is currently on the nomination committee for the National Design Awards, Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum/Smithonian Institution.

Over the last decade Jen has become an internationally recognized researcher of medieval beadwork of the 10th to 16th centuries. As well as running a website, MedievalBeads.com, she has authored an article for Beadwork Magazine on the subject. Her interest in obscure beadwork came from her membership in the largest historical reenactment group in the world, the Society for Creative Anachronism. This qualifies her as a major geek worthy of getting a wedgie from a Klingon.

Photos:
Unrelated to her various interests in various time periods or design, she is a photobug and constantly brags about her pictures at http://flickr.com/verybigjen

Pincushions:
In an attempt to make some little gifts for her SCA pals, she has taken up making pincushions. Her popular galleries and tutorials on flickr have led to her designs being featured in book from Lark Publishing called "Pretty Little Pincushions" that was released in November 2007.

Podcasting:
Jen does a scifi podcast with her two friends Dave Caolo and Gedeon Maheux. It started as a bet over the last season of Battlestar Galacticaand has grown to a more weekly discussion on all things scifi that you can find on itunes.

Personal:
Jen has a darling IT geek hubby, three dogs and two cats and collects snowdomes, which of course have their own site at Domeorama.com. Basically, Jen spends every waking moment online doing one thing or another - and housework as little as possible. (Probably because she spends too much time on Flickr or any of the other junk above.)



Just a note of disclosure: I am the designer for ArtFire. I hope you don't find that a problem but great pains have been taken to ensure that my shop is shown no favoritism at all. I am excluded from all promotional opportunities, and automated features.