PHOTO: The House That Jerry Built

Driving on the Kanda Highway just about 300 metres from the Gold House traffic lights towards Nima, one suddenly comes upon what must be one of the craziest buildings in the capital.

Its bright orange colour makes the building stand out among the many rust-brown roofs that surround it. But what really marks out this building is a white VW Beetle saloon car which appears to have flown straight through the wall on the left side and come through the front.

The building houses JFX, a relatively small integrated design company whose Creative and Managing Director does not take kindly to the description of his office as �craziest�.

�No, it is not crazy, rather say it is creative�, Jerry Jiriku told this reporter during a lunch time stop-over last Tuesday. �Here, we consider ourselves as living in a creative world of our own and we try to demonstrate the creativity in everything we do�.

Jerry�s company is into creative design, branding, offset and digital printing, fabrication, signages as well as concept development for radio and television commercials.

Their clients include Myturn Ltd, rlg communications, BT Group International, Innovative EPS, E-volution and Pamoni Clothing.

For anyone to buy the shell of a classic VW, cut it into two and stick the pieces on each side of an office building is not a regular thing to do. Yet that is what Jerry and his small team of nine staff have done.

�The essence of branding is to set yourself differently from your competitors�, Jerry said. �Before we moved in here, we had a number of brainstorming sessions and members of my team contributed many ideas as to what unique signage to adopt. Finally we came up with this idea, and it works for us fine.�

Jerry explained that as creative people with a passion, they aim at making things that appear impossible possible and expressed the hope that in the not-too-distant future, JFX will be playing with the big advertisers.

Curiously, Jerry Jiriku is relatively a late-comer to the creative business. He did not really plan to be in that industry; it appears that the industry jumped at him.

�One of my favourite subjects at Labone Secondary School was art,� he said, �but I did not quite follow that direction until after school,
I worked at a communication centre on Legon campus. That was when I began designing success cards and stuff like that.

He said that it was the boss of Orakle Multimedia who really set him on the path of the creative industry when he engaged him in his company and gave him an opportunity to study on the job both in Ghana and USA.

Source: Daily Graphic