0484 has officially left the building.
Over the weekend, Matt and I moved out of our office inside the Pacific Tower in downtown Long Beach where we've enjoyed a space for the past year and half. (As you can imagine, it's hard for us to walk away from any office whose 'conference' table also serves as a pool and ping pong table)
In the fall of 07 I was approached by Andrew Anson, who works with a local marketing company called IM/TMA, about setting up an office space adjacent to theirs. The tenants would consist of a mix of creative businesses and freelancers who could work on their own and also collaborate with IM/TMA and amongst each other.
Andrew was a client whom I had met, back in 2005, in response to a CraigsList 'Graphic Designer needed' posting which he had listed. Back when I was in Film school at Cal State and still operating under the name GABE YEH DESIGN, I would periodically respond to various CL posts which I felt I was qualified for. Out of approximately 100,000 posts that we've ever responded to over the years, Matt and I have received about 30 email replies which have turned into three paying clients. (point being: CL works well for some things, like selling lawn chairs or sold out Miley Cyrus tickets, but in terms of finding design clients, it's a much different story; one probably worthy of it's own post sometime in the future)
Two of the three CL contacts, Andrew and Rokenbok toy company out in Solana Beach, have become solid, long term clients for us. The third was a New York based online adult toy store for whom we designed a few t-shirts with questionable subject matter. I'm fairly sure, based on the few weeks of sporadic contact we had, that our contact at the company was abusing many different drugs and that his 'business' was actually a front to launder money for organized crime. Needless to say, a few months after we began working together, said client went completely MIA just as we were in the middle of designing packaging for a line of all natural, edible laundry detergents. -Listen, before you judge us for taking on this client in the first place, let me remind you of the CL odds and statistics I just mentioned. Trust me, if you sent out as many emails as we did, and 99% of them are never merely responded to, by the time someone actually emailed you back and offered to hire you, they could damn well be asking you to design packaging for anthrax-laced children's vitamins and you're at least going to hear them out.
Anyway, back more towards the point, in late 2007 we helped set up the IM/TMA design studio next door to the existing IM/TMA offices. We've had a good solid run the past 19 months or so and it was definitely a positive experience for Matt and I. We never needed an office space, but the networking opportunities it allowed for us helped tremendously to kick start the growth of 0484.
With that said, I personally just moved down to Newport Beach, and with Matt living in San Diego, keeping the space in Long Beach no longer made sense for us. But we will continue working with Andrew and IM/TMA and the relationship we've built with The ID Agency has been instrumental for us as well.
Please note our new mailing address and direct all checks, packages, postcards and fan mail to: 962 Baywood Drive, Newport Beach, California 92660
