about me.

I'm Jay Van Dyke, a musician, web designer, and developer based in Bergen County, New Jersey. Most of my work these days is in Squarespace, building sites for small businesses, creatives, and nonprofits.

Music is where everything started. Growing up, family road trips meant Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, and Jimi Hendrix on repeat. Drums became an obsession. After convincing my parents to buy me a kit, percussion took over most of my life for the next fifteen years. I started formally studying music in school like most people but I couldn't stop. My days were spent behind my drumset and playing on my drum pad. Anyone sitting near me in school was constantly "serenaded" by my relentless tapping and drumming on my desk. I decided that this was going to be my life's work and I pursued that through Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers, where I earned a degree in music performance. Artists like Blind Melon, John Frusciante, Yeasayer, Led Zeppelin, and many others shaped my taste just as much as any conservatory study.

The years after college were spent playing gigs around New Jersey and New York in bands like Copesetic, Head Cheerleader, the One & Nines, and many others. Teaching became a big part of that period too. Private percussion students kept a steady income going, and working with high school drumlines brought me back into the educational side of music.

Around 2008, The Lumineers entered the picture. Similarly to their story in Denver, I answered a Craigslist ad for a band looking for a drummer. Shortly after joining we dove in headfirst. Playing shows and writing songs with them for a couple of years led to co-writing "Scotland", which became the theme song for the TV show Reign, and "Gun Song" from their album Cleopatra. My drumming ended up on the Japanese release of their first album.

With some gigs dwindling and frustration with my career outside of music, California came calling. In 2012, grad school at Cal State East Bay offered a chance to formally combine music and technology through their MA in Multimedia program, think coding meets art. That's where the Sand Noise Device happened. A four-person team built this generative music system that used sand as an interface—the goal was making something musical that didn't require any training to play. The result was a fully immersive musical and physical experience that was part instrument and part art installation. Though this project was the culmination of the graduate program at CSU, we were featured in and invited to a few high-profile events. Maker Faire was the first and opened many doors for us, exhibitions at Moogfest, Engadget Expand, Exploratorium After Dark, and a few others followed, along with interviews and write-ups in The New York Times, Billboard, Engadget, CNET, and Vice. The project became my thesis and marked a clear turning point toward digital work.

Web design grew out of that shift. Over the past decade, building websites has become the main focus. Squarespace is the primary platform, I'm a Squarespace Expert and Circle Platinum member, and my Upwork profile sits at Top Rated Plus after hundreds of projects. The work involves a lot of problem-solving and back-and-forth with clients who want their sites to feel like them, not like a template. Clean design matters, but so does functionality and making sure the site actually serves its purpose.

Music, always my first passion, still influences how I think about structure and detail, but web work scratches the same creative itch. Building something that works well and looks good requires the same attention that arranging a song does. The tools changed, but the process feels familiar.