Meet Aaron Hoffman: Health Tech Geek & Food Nerd
New Direction
Hi, I'm Aaron Hoffman and I'm taking over this blog from now on. Why, you ask? Well to talk about the things I'm passionate about - health tech and cooking great food. In order to understand why I'm qualified to talk about such broad subjects, the founders of Nudge decided I should write about where I come from and how I got here. It's a bit long because I'm old. Really old. I promise all future articles will be much shorter and to the point.
The Early Days
Growing up in the wheat fields of Kansas, I found out at a very young age that there were two things I was interested in that shaped me and my choices as I’ve moved through life. Those things are technology and cooking. In the early 80s, many 8 year old boys like me were obsessed with River Raid on the Atari 2600, but I will venture to guess there weren’t many of those same kids waking up at 6 am on a Saturday morning to cook (albeit poorly made) eggs and bacon for their family. Yeah, I was that much of a food nerd.
By age 12 I graduated to the Commodore 64 where I was addicted to Maniac Mansion and coding in Basic. Oh, and I was also making some pretty killer omelets, baking bread, and learning the ropes of smoking large hunks of meat with my Dad. At 15, my family moved to upstate New York and I got my first computer graphic design job. A family friend bought a “newfangled” computer, scanning, and vinyl cutting plotting system. He also knew nothing about how a computer works. Once I got it set up, I ended up designing vinyl graphics and lettering on that system for the next 2 years.
At 17 I was thinking about college but at the time, digital graphic design wasn’t something taught at most schools. I read an article in the local newspaper about a snowboard company called Apocalypse. Of course I had been influenced by great design in the skateboarding and snowboarding worlds so I HAD to get a job there. I sent Apocalypse a resume followed by a call every week for 3 months. The receptionist there hated me (and rightly so), but I finally got a call from their art director. Before I knew it I was designing graphics for all of their snowboards as well as display ads, which got published in Transworld Snowboarding. I was right where I wanted to be and had no desire to go to college.
In 1994, I ended up moving back to Kansas for the opportunity to manage a digital imaging department at a large photo lab. That may sound somewhat boring, but we worked on the latest computers as well as the very first high end digital cameras and scanners. It was a great opportunity to feed my techno-lust and it’s also where I met my future business partner, Alex Ogle.
The Creation Of Jonni Nitro
By 1996 the internet had permeated even small towns in Kansas, so Alex and I were working nights and weekends to learn as much as we could about web technology. Macromedia’s Flash had just come out and it blew our minds. The ability to view smooth animation online was unheard of, especially over a 33.6 kbps modem. We started experimenting with vector animation and Alex came up with an ingenious software process to take raw video and import it into Flash. That’s how our new company, Tubatomic, was born.
In 1997 we created Jonni Nitro - an online Flash animated series that was stark black and white animation with a femme fatale storyline. Many people compared it to the style of Frank Miller comics and in fact the film Sin City was a very expensive and advanced version of what we were doing, although that came 8 years after the release of Jonni. Within the first few months of posting episodes of JN, we went from zero visitors to almost 100,000, which at the time was pretty incredible web traffic. Soon after we struck a deal with a company in Hollywood to fly us out to LA, shoot the episodes, then come back and animate them in Kansas. They secured Olivia d’Abo and Thomas Jane to act in the series and things really started to take off. Jonni was being featured in Spin, TV Guide, MTV Online, Playboy Online, and CNN as well as countless message boards. We were invited to speaking engagements at design conferences in Hong Kong and France.
Recently Jonni Nitro has gained critical acclaim. In 2011 CNN named Jonni Nitro as one of 6 milestones of the internet, and in 2014 JN will be part of an international art exhibition that kicks off at the Barbican in London.
Tubatomic
Unfortunately the “Dot Bomb” took out the company that was paying for the production of JN in 2000, so Alex and I decided to switch gears away from creating online content and start doing innovative Flash design and development with Tubatomic. We had recently relocated Tubatomic to Chattanooga, TN where we met and brought on Jason Fritts and George Bairaktaris as partners. We soon had a boutique interactive agency that had a client list consisting of Turner Broadcasting, Intercontinental Hotels, Ruby Tuesday Restaurants, HGTV, Warner Bros. Music, and (yes!) The Food Network.
Tubatomic won several design awards including an Apple Design Award, which made all of us Mac fanboys very happy. Tubatomic also organized the first ever american 24 hour web design competition in 2005 called cre824. The winners of cre824 went on to compete at the international competition in France and took first place.
After 10 years with Tubatomic, I felt the need to strike out on my own. It was hard to admit, but I knew with the incredible amount of talent and expertise of my partners and workmates, they would be just fine without me. I moved on to work at other agencies with creatives and developers which gave me experience in other areas of technology and innovation.
Food Nerdism
While interactive design and technology was my day job, I’ve never lost my passion for cooking. Traveling to different spots in the world opened my mind up to different cultures and techniques. I have a tendency to break things down to bare essentials in order to layer them back into something great, and cooking is the perfect way to indulge my methods. For example, if I wanted to make pizza, it was never good enough to make just ANY pizza. I had to study the way original neapolitan dough was created - water, high gluten flour, salt, and natural sourdough starter. The tomato sauce had to be made with the best, but simple ingredients - San Marzano tomatoes, garlic, fresh basil, salt. The cheese must be buffalo mozzarella. Great pizza is cooked at a minimum of 700 degrees, so I hacked my oven to get to 750 degrees and cooked it on a terracotta tile for the perfect crust. That’s how my food nerd mind works.
Meeting Nudge
In 2011 I had the pleasure of meeting Phil Beene, Mac Gambill, and Chris Garson. They had some very innovative ideas of creating a new health app so we soon got to work building it. Here it is 2 years later and that health app is now a reality called Nudge. It has become an incredible tool to measure how healthy you’re living with a single score called the Nudge Factor. In addition, it hooks into other apps that you’re already using so you can connect all of your data and see the results in one place.
As the resident technology geek and food nerd, I’d like to make it official that this blog will now be home to the latest and greatest health tech that’s out there, as well as my recipes and food observations that feed my food nerd mind. I hope you enjoy it and look forward to your input and feedback as I welcome any open discussions!
Tech Love & Great Dishes,
Aaron Hoffman