On Monday of this week, EA (Pogo’s parent company) announced it would lay off 1500 workers by April of 2010 in an effort to reduce costs. It’s probably no coincidence that the same day they announced the acquisition of PlayFish, a maker of social networking games such as Restaurant City, a Facebook game Pogo is now heavily promoting on their web site. Unfortunately, the layoffs began on Monday and Pogo was not immune. We’re not sure how many people in total were laid off, but they lost at least one very talented graphic artist: Julia Lundman.
As fans of Julia’s Pogo artwork, we’ve been following her blog for about a year and a half now and were saddened yesterday to see the following:
For the past few years, I have been working at Electronic Arts online casual gaming company, Pogo.com, as a staff artist. I have been primarily designing game art, costumes, backgrounds, and badges. On Monday I was laid off due to overseas outsourcing. I feel sad about this, especially since every single day I came into work feeling excited and happy about the work I was doing. I always took every single project seriously, no matter how ‘small’ or how ‘big’ the assignment was. I’ve always held that if an artist is a good artist, no matter what he or she touches, it should be of the highest quality and taken seriously.
Julia’s art speaks for itself — she’s talented and creative and undoubtedly she was the artist behind many of your favorite badges, mini costumes, and more around Pogoland. She spent most of yesterday posting some of her work to her blog, most of which we’ve already seen. (She was the creative force behind the cool Canasta beatnik art, the game rank images for Penguin Blocks and First Class Solitaire, and a ton of our favorite mini items.) Perhaps the most interesting to us is the concept art she posted for a Pogo Kids version and a virtual world concept that might still be in our future in some form due to the Hasbro contract.
These pieces give us a glimpse not only of Julia’s amazing talent but of some of the ideas that Pogo might be bouncing around behind the scenes at any given time. Check out the Pogo Kids avatars and the Pogo Virtual World concept art that she’s posted. Really neat stuff.
Her whole blog is worth checking out because you can see her influence on Pogo projects over time (or vice-versa!), but our favorite Pogo-related post is about last year’s Thanksgiving Mini release.
Julia: if you’re out there, best wishes from all of us fans. We’re really going to miss your unique style and creativity. Pogo is not going to be the same without you. No matter what company you’re exercising your creative muscles with, we’re sure your talents will take you very far!
Filed under: unreleased images
