The JibJab Blog

Stick Your Face In It!

Celebrating a Year of JibJabbing

Today here at JibJab a time honored tradition continued as a silver wristwatch made it’s way into the hands of Johan, our Product Manager of Uber 1337ness. Why did we give him a watch? You see, each time a JibJabber celebrates a year in our company, they are passed down the one-year-watch to display as a trophy on their desk. Thus, here we have Johan inheriting the heirloom from Damian, the last guy to hit a year’s time with us. The unopened watch is symbolic of a year’s hard work, the preciousness of time and the ever present weight of man’s mortality. Or it may just be passed around for fun. When asked to reflect on his full year at JibJab, Johan said he had learned one thing. “Never ever leave your computer unlocked when you leave your desk.” Yeah, that about sums up a year working with team JibJab.

April 7, 2009
Eat This Easter Teaser!

Remember those cute bunnies we were toting around last month? Well now you get to find out what that was all about, as we premiere all of our zany new Easter content tonight! Looking back on the production of Chocolate Bunny Attack, we had a lot of fun. We climbed trees and wrangled soft furry critters to bring you the funny, but rest assure, no bunnies or actors named Jordan were harmed in the making of this instant Easter classic. Check out our production photos below, along with the world premiere of our new Easter eCard!

Vodpod videos no longer available.

April 6, 2009
We’ve got Fans, Friends and Followers!

A few months ago Cinematech blogger and all around great guy Scott Kirsner stopped by our offices to interview Gregg and Evan for his new book Fans, Friends, and Followers: Building an Audience and a Creative Career in the Digital Age. Scott writes for the Boston Globe, New York Times, Wired and Variety so we were most excited to speak with him! His book explores how filmmakers, musicians, artists, writers and comedians are cultivating an audience and business model in today’s webby world, with interviews from big name peeps all over the internets. We are super honored to be included in the book, which you can pick up right over at Amazon.com. Here’s an excerpt of what you can expect from our interview, extra small so you consider buying the book 😉

April 3, 2009
Something to Write Home About

Ever since we opened up the lines of communication with our fans by blog, Twitter and Facebook, the out pour of amazing feedback has been nothing short of overwhelming. We read every message and comment that we get, and one we received today was worth writing home about, literally.

Dear JibJab Geniuses
First, i am not sure that the greeting is legal, however I wanted to share a story with you. I created a jibjab video for my 4 yr old nephew a year ago. He has mild special needs and speech difficulties and literally loved the video. The HSM video showed “him” doing things that he couldn’t do and he loved it. He watched the video hundreds of times and danced and sang with the video until, frankly, my sister went crazy listening to it.
So in your letters home to Mom and Dad, don’t forget to mention that this little job of yours is not only fun and games but it also makes the world a better place for one little boy named Leighton.
Sincerely,
Patty Brown

Greg and Evan were so touched that they did in fact tell their mom! Grevan’s mom writes, “Hi again. If appropriate, you should let her know that your Mom read this and it brought tears to her eyes. No kidding. Love Mom”.

It’s this sort of stuff that keeps us motivated while making fun for people to share all over the world. Patty, we’re touched, keep on JibJabbing and tell your nephew we said hi!

April 2, 2009
April Foolishness

We’ve added a whole lot of fun to the site over the past few days and there are a few things we just had to let you know about! For one, our wildly popular Chippendales Starring You! dance is now available apart from Christmas and Valentine’s Day. In just a few days over 50,000 of them have been made! Join in the fun here if you haven’t already, they make a great April Fool’s gag.

We’ve also been working hard to cook up fun new Postables for use on social networking sites like Facebook and Myspace. You’ll see we have some sweet movie poster parodies up in our Movies section, featuring spoofs on The Matrix and Pretty Woman. Plus, we’ve just added an awesome new category called Profile Pics! For a taste of what can be done in Profile Pics, here are a few examples from real JibJab employees, currently in use on their profile pages!

April 1, 2009
Embarking Upon the JibJab Collegiate Tour

And he’s off! Today marks the first day of Evan’s big North American college tour, as he prepares to embark on a massive journey, hitting art schools from Florida to Canada all April long in search of fresh talent! Ringling, Tisch, Temple, RISD, Sheridan, CalArts… no school is safe from his scouting. Thus, if you’re a student at any of the aforementioned universities, keep your eyes peeled for presentations and job fair appearances from our man Evan! And Evan, don’t forget to get us some souvenirs!

UPDATE: Evan bumped into a fan! He writes, “This is my neighbor Dave (we’re sitting in front of the can). I was working on a file on my laptop and he saw JibJab in the text. We got to talking and it turns out he has our ‘early years’ DVD and loves Starring You! We asked Helen, the stewardess to take a picture…”

March 31, 2009
It’s Trampoline Time… with Tim!

See Tim. See Tim jump. See Tim jump high. About as high as a normal person can jump without a trampoline. Out at a party this weekend, we snapped these pictures of our Director of Ops getting a little air. Emphasis on the little. We still love you Tim.

March 30, 2009
Our Poor Potted Plant

Recently, the plant in the kitchen hasn’t been doing so well. His brother, 6 feet away seemed to be thriving though. A mystery was afoot. Why was one plant leafy green, while the other wasted away? Then it hit us. Because our kitchen doesn’t have a sink. So our friend the kitchen plant was being fed a fantastic diet of left over beer, soda and coffee. Since this discovery, we’ve been much better to our potted pal, and he’s growing again. We’re sorry little guy, we didn’t mean to stunt your growth!

March 27, 2009
Whoa, posting JibJab stuff to Facebook is SUPER easy now!

We’ve been working long and hard to find the perfect way to let you post JibJab stuff on your Facebook. Would building an application be the best way to go? How about just using a third party app? Should JibJabbers just upload the videos right onto Facebook? Well today we’re proud to announce that we’ve caught up with Facebook’s ever changing format and now it is possible for you to drop a sweet, sweet Sendable right into your newsfeed! We’re really enjoying this new feature, and it’s available after making anything in our library, so try it out! You’ll also find a revamped share page with easy access to URLs and related content you might like. Big ol’ props to Phillip, Johan and our amazing tech team for this killer release!

March 26, 2009
Belting Barbershop

Most JibJab songs you’ll hear are never quite music to your ears. After all, nobody really expects politicians to sing like opera stars or Bono. Plus, not many of us have had music lessons. It’s our theory that the best way to mask bad singing is by getting as many bad singers together on a track as possible. They cancel each other out right? Thus, we had a bit of a recording booth clown car in action today at the studio, as we belted barbershop style for an upcoming Sendable. Aren’t we attractive with our jaws ajar?

March 25, 2009
An Editor Extraordinare

For the past few months we’ve been excited to have Daniel here in house, working his animation and editing voodoo on what we like to call our “shorties”, aka the remixed public domain footage eCards we feature at JibJab.com. Andy, an ingenious writer/producer here at the site, has been overseeing our shorties program since it’s start about a year ago, and of the several artists and editors he has had cranking out shorties over the past year, Daniel brings one of the most unique voices to the site. Daniel boasts credits that range from his work on cartoons for Hanna-Barbara to a series of PBS shorts called Inventoons. For more of his work, including his wildly popular He-Man remixes, check out his various websites and youtube channels, embedded all over this mighty paragraph! Oh yes, and Daniel wanted us to mention, he can probably whoop you good in a game of Boggle. He’s just sayin.

March 24, 2009
They Call Him Galen

Galen Foard has been aboard the good ship JibJab for some 30 months, originally hired right out of Emerson to star on our operations team. Since, his love for numbers has led him to a sweet accounting position, as our ace-in-the-hole audit avenger. Now for some fun facts about Galen… He has never made a normal face in any picture ever taken of him. This month, Galen had his car stolen, twice, in the same week. On the weekends, Galen donates his time to a non profit animal rescue group called Much Love. When asked what we should write about his last 2 and a half years at JibJab, he demanded we write about his “spuer 1337 ninja skillz”. Oh, and Galen loves teh kittehz. Yeah, that about sums things up.

March 23, 2009
Spring Has Sprung!

Vernal equinox is today, one of those rare March 20th ones at that, but we’re on the ball. In honor of budding trees, green grass and hatching eggs, we bring you some sketches of little chicks from artist Trish Tatman! We particularly like the smiling one on the far right. JibJab is set to unleash a cavalcade of chicks, ducks and bunnies just in time for Easter, so stay tuned!

March 20, 2009
An Avalanche of New Stuff!
Whoa! In the wake of St. Patrick’s Day madness, we’re loading our site up with lots (and we mean LOTS) of new content.

Our birthday section is looking a little spiffier now that we’ve got such gems as…

Insane Talking Cake
Relax
Born in the 80’s
Zorro’s Pinata

Our love eCards are now overstocked with goodies, you may want to check out…

I Fing Love You
You’re My Boing
Farting Soulmates
I’m Glad I Found You
Opposites Attract

Even our good luck category has been beefed up, with the addition of…

Shock Gibson
Crossing Everything
Good Luck from All of Us

There are even more updates all over our eCards section in almost every category, so check them out! We’ll leave you with this diamond in the rough from our engagement section to wet your whistle…

Vodpod videos no longer available.
March 19, 2009
Take a Card, Any Card

By now, it should be clear that we like to put our heads on things. A lot. So when it comes to our business cards, the choice was clear… giant disembodied heads! We hold a photo shoot for new hires and encourage each employee to make the zaniest face they can muster, leaving it to our art team to digitally snip out each head. Once new cards print, we make sure to slap one up on our JibJab logo wall for all to see. As we highlight people on this blog over the next few months, you’ll see these cards popping up here and there.

March 18, 2009