What does LaundryMEDIA mean?

I wanted to bring to light where LaundryMEDIA came from. I started it back in 1997 when I was attending Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NJ. Right http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.giffrom the get-go I knew that going through the graphic design courses at a "conceptual" art school wasn't going to provide me with the skillset I needed to get a job out of school. So I skipped classes during the week and started LaundryMEDIA, my own web design business. I did have a shillset at the time that included Quark, Adobe Pagemaker, Freehand and a Photoshop-like software (don't remember). I had designed logos, brochures for plays in highschool, my own aggressive inline skating magazine called DailyWorx that was local to the South Jersey/Philadelphia area. I started this with my good buddy Jimmy Shuda, who now is an acclaimed skater. Here he is on video and a link with more information if you are into skating.

I bought A LOT of books on website usability, designing for the web, typography, design books featuring firms that were Swiss, German, British, Asian and lots of books on the California surf/skate design scene. I was picking and choosing what I liked and trying to decide where my own style fit in. I was laying my path. The idea of sorting through ideas, tossing the ones I didn't like aside and mashing up the ones I liked and bundling them into each and every design led me to the word "laundry." At the time I was getting heavy into Flash. I remember at the time while everyone was trying to figure out the Adobe suite in college, I was teaching myself Flash and teaching our professor during classes. You can see my college portfolio here.

So LaundryMEDIA's formula looks like this: "laundry" + New Media + problem solving + sorting + sifting + mashing + multimedia + simplicity. As I grew into more of a marketing point of view I was able to look at campaigns, projects and microsites from all angles from UI design to marketing to programming to web standards to traditional business to strategy, making me quite the hybrid talent as the time. Now a new evolution...

I'm not big into dreams, but I thought what LaundryMEDIA could mean for me now. I found this:

"Dreaming that you are sorting the laundry indicates that you are trying to understand your own feelings and sorting your attitudes."

If we insert "Media" I would say that this is my feelings/attitude towards what is happening in Media from Marketing to Creative to Business to Strategy. I like that; purpose.

I'll not only be posting here a lot now, but you can find me over at bjcook.gooruze.com where I am a founding Gooru for this new online marketing community.