Two stick figures saying "hi".

About us

JMX2 is a bou­tique dig­i­tal pro­duc­tion com­pa­ny found­ed by Jon Mag­n­er and John Morton. 

Two cre­atives. Two techies. Two friends. Here’s our story.

It began in an ad agency in NYC

We met each oth­er in 2001 at Bozell in New York City. We worked pri­mar­i­ly on Datek, an online trad­ing com­pa­ny, and projects for Macy’s, Ver­i­zon, and Ben and Jer­ry’s. We had a great time build­ing dig­i­tal things: ani­ma­tions, ads, games, and cod­ing exper­i­ments. We also enjoyed work­ing together. 

But cir­cum­stances changed. Datek was acquired by anoth­er com­pa­ny. Bozell closed. Our first chap­ter was over, but it had been a good one.

We hit the free­lance mar­ket, and both end­ed up at Ogilvy on long-term gigs. We weren’t paired up as a team at the agency, but we still worked togeth­er on a few projects. Even­tu­al­ly, each of us drift­ed away from Ogilvy. Anoth­er chap­ter ended.

As inde­pen­dent con­sul­tants, we hopped around the NYC ad world, pick­ing up gigs where they hap­pened. The stick­ing point was each of us want­ed to find work at the inter­sec­tion of code and cre­ative. Those gigs were hard to come by. Choos­ing to be a coder” or a cre­ative” did­n’t allow us to pro­duce the type of work we want­ed to do.

Let’s put on a show!

In 2008, Jon sug­gest­ed we start a shop com­bin­ing those inter­ests into a sin­gle role. What a great idea! That’s where the real sto­ry began.

We chose a name.

We built a website. 

We start­ed work­ing. (Not nec­es­sar­i­ly in that order.)

The peo­ple we worked with in the past still want­ed to work with us now that we had hung out our shin­gle as devel­op­ers who under­stand of how the adver­tis­ing sausage gets made.

We worked hard to make things right every time. Our goal was the high­est qual­i­ty of work, always on time, and com­pet­i­tive­ly priced. 

It was a good com­bi­na­tion. The work kept com­ing in. 

15+ years later

Amaz­ing­ly, we’re doing the same gen­er­al thing fif­teen years lat­er. The tech­nol­o­gy behind the work has changed, but keep­ing up with tech is part of the job. It’s also what keeps it interesting. 

Some bul­let points

We still focus on the inter­sec­tion of our inter­ests. What exact­ly are those interests?

  • ani­ma­tion and design
  • inter­ac­tiv­i­ty and games
  • front-end devel­op­ment and UX (user experience)
  • back-end devel­op­ment and AX (author­ing experience)
  • sto­ry­telling through technology

In prac­ti­cal terms, that means we make hand-cod­ed ani­mat­ed ban­ners, Insta­gram videos, web­sites, apps, email tem­plat­ing sys­tems, back-end sys­tems to pow­er our cre­ations, and more.

We work pri­mar­i­ly in the brand­ing and adver­tis­ing realm. That means we work with many of the world’s biggest brands. Throw a rock at the For­tune 500, and you’ll find many of our clients.

Even more bul­let points

Are you look­ing for more bul­let points? Well, we are here to sat­is­fy. Here are some of the spe­cif­ic tech­nolo­gies we use day-to-day.

  • Craft CMS — Our default CMS for con­tent creation
  • GSAP for ani­mat­ed ban­ners and web animations 
  • HTML/CSS
  • Can­vas
  • Javascript and Typescript
  • Vue / Alpine
  • PHP / Laravel
  • Node / Deno

That’s not an exhaus­tive list. We’re always exper­i­ment­ing with new tech and love a new challenge. 

There are exam­ples of our work on our home­page, but if you’re look­ing for some­thing spe­cif­ic, please ask us for exam­ples. We’ve got a deep archive of work.

About you

That’s enough about us. Hope­ful­ly you’re here because you have some­thing you need to get done. Con­tact us to get start­ed. We’d enjoy hear­ing from you. 😀