Vol 05

Story time.

When I first moved to New York City in 2019, I was running off that youthful, straight-out-of-college energy. The kind you need to survive and figure things out when you're just starting off. You live off an unwavering belief in yourself and your ability to push through and make it in such a charged environment.

I was working at a startup in Union Square called LeagueApps. I was happy because the job let me help youth sports clubs with their websites. Coincidentally, the same way I'd started making websites back in 7th grade. LeagueApps had me designing and coding as many sites as possible, somewhere between 10 and 20 a month.

A couple months into the move, a friend mentioned that a new "sound room" was opening in Brooklyn called Public Records. I somehow felt like I already knew what he was talking about, maybe from seeing it online, but I really didn't. Then around July 2019, I decided to go in one night and check it out.

Walking into 233 Butler for the first time, what struck me first was the clean openness of the space. As I took the room in and looked up, I noticed these floating sculptural plywood speakers hanging from the ceiling. They held all my attention, reverberating sound that, to me, felt surreal.

Still craning my neck, I noticed the speakers had a tag on the side that read OJAS. I looked it up on Instagram right then and was immediately sold. A couple days later, I reached out to Devon, and he candidly reached back. It came as a surprise, since I was just a kid getting started, but him giving me the light of day really inspired me.

I pitched Devon on doing his website. He mentioned he was wrapping up some graphics first so we could get to designing. So I waited. Months passed, and we kept in loose communication, both busy on our own channels.

Then, in the second quarter of 2020, everything shut down. And from one day to the next, I saw Devon had a new website — made by none other than Virgil Abloh. I was in complete shock, and I couldn't have been happier for him.

That experience, so early in my career, taught me that you can really strive for anything you want. Getting Devon's recognition, and watching Virgil build a brutalist WordPress site for him, kept me energized to keep going for more.

Seven years later, I was back in New York for a Basic.Space NY event that I'd built the website for. Devon happened to be doing a sound installation there, and we reconnected in person. He recognized me right away, and mentioned he needed help with his .nyc domain — some improvements ahead of upcoming releases, while keeping the same design ethos Virgil had set for him.

Over the span of four months, we built two fresh websites: ojas.tokyo, to establish OJAS's presence in Japan in light of the opening of Karimoku Commons, and ojas.nyc, which just launched for the presale of the KOR2 Klipsch speaker.

Looking back, it's clear how everything happens for a reason. I honestly don't think I would've made as good a website as Virgil did for Devon back then. But now I'm truly honored to take on Virgil's Canary Yellow website source code and apply his methodology of redesigning something by only changing 3%.

I'm deeply humbled by this. It's always been a priority for me to work with people who inspire me, people I consider the best at what they do.

I'm grateful to say this is one of those experiences, and I look forward to seeing Devon continue to make amazing things and authentically influence a whole generation by doing what he loves.

— Jon Rivera