Artist Spotlight: Jordan Tiegs

He was mentioned in passing as the “son who designs cars for fun” to Joey Gase by his mom during a hospital visit. Little did Mom know, she just ignited a NASCAR design career.

1️⃣ How did you get your start designing?

Outside of the NASCAR video game paint booths, my design career began pretty late in the game in 2014 when I took an introduction to Adobe Photoshop class in my freshman year of high school. I would finish our lessons as fast as I could in class so that I could use the rest of our class time to hand-draw side profiles of stock cars in Photoshop with the paintbrush tool. Eventually I found a low quality .jpg of a Chevy SS which I then used to mask my own rudimentary paint schemes onto. (Beware. They’re rough.)

I enjoyed the Photoshop class so much that I requested a custom curriculum class during an open period in which I taught myself Adobe Illustrator and continued to make more and more concept and imaginary car designs during every open moment I had while in high school.

In my senior year, I took several college-level classes which dialed in more of my skills in Illustrator and Photoshop before ultimately graduating and going to college for Graphic Communications & Technologies.

It was during my second year of classes that, while sitting at my school computer, I decided I would commit to NASCAR scheme design and created my online persona of “Jordan Tiegs Designs” with the creation of my Instagram and made my own vector templates of all sorts of race cars which became my format for posting all of my original design work on my social media. 

2️⃣ Where do you turn for inspiration?

Every time I sit down to make a design, I try to have some idea in my head already for what the car should look like. However, sometimes I just blank out and have nothing, and I turn to what is likely my first passion in life: Hot Wheels cars. I’ve been a Hot Wheels collector since the moment I got home from the hospital, and that love for cars helped me get to where I am now.

When searching for inspiration, I often turn to my collection of Hot Wheels cars and will look at some of the designs of the bodies of the cars and the fun graphics printed on them and think to myself, “How could I twist the style used on these cars to make it work for this sponsor?” More often than not I’ll start drawing with no plan in mind, which more often than not results in designs I like much more than ones I have an existing plan for.

3️⃣ What project of yours personally are you most proud of and why?

Other than the Clippy car which we’ll touch on in a bit, two designs come to mind. The first design of mine that stands out to me is the Joey Gase Donate Life Virginia car we ran in the spring Richmond race in 2023. That car was the first time I ever got to do a special-themed design for a sponsor. That race took place April 1, 2023 and April is Donate Life Month so we used the 2023 Donate Life Month branding of frogs, lily pads and water lilies to make what culminated in a really beautiful design which still sits solidly in my top three favorite designs of mine.

The other car that stands out, for obvious reasons, is the Patrick Emerling fall Martinsville 2022 car which had my logo on the hood. That weekend, the team was struggling to find a sponsor for the race, which was taking place the day before Halloween. It was then that I was contacted about designing a Halloween-themed design to bring some attention to the car and was told that if I would like, I could put my logo on the hood instead of being paid for the design — which, given the cost of a hood sponsorship, I jumped at!

Unfortunately, we got caught up in a wreck that day, but not everything was bad because I now own the hood of that car, which hangs prominently in my office.  

4️⃣ What's your ‘trademark’ style that helps you stand out from other designers?

All of my friends who see my designs will be very quick to say that my trademark design style is very sharp and angular. And, complicated designs — prime example being David Starr’s No. 66 WNB Factory car from Atlanta 2025 — and they would be correct. I don’t know what it is about those style designs but they tickle my brain the right way.

A lot of my designs I feel would fit in perfectly with the style of stuff seen in the winged COT era of NASCAR which (sorry) is my favorite Cup body style. While I'm by no means alone in making those types of designs, I feel that when designing cars that run in the mid-to-back half of the field, it’s important to make sure the car is different from many of the solid-color cars that tend to run around in that area. And though I tend to lean spiky in my design language, I’m always trying to branch out and try new things to make sure the sponsors and fans have a pretty race car to look at come race day!

5️⃣ As many designers aim for the top teams of NASCAR, you’ve seemed to have covered many of the underdog teams, most notably a long relationship with Joey Gase. How did you connect with Joey and how did that relationship unfold into what it is today? 

Though I hope to one day have the opportunity to design for a team that can compete at a higher level on a week to week basis, I value my connection with Garrett Smithley/SS Greenlight Racing, and Joey Gase and his team more than anything.

It was in 2014 when my connection with Joey was more or less formed. Joey’s story is well known and his connection with Donate Life as a result is one of the best stories in motorsports. It was the week of the 2014 [NASCAR] Nationwide [Series] race at Iowa when doing an appearance at the University of Iowa Hospital, where my mother worked at the time, that she approached Joey and spoke with him about how her son does NASCAR designs for fun. And that was where things stayed for years until in 2020 I got an email from Joey’s PR team to see if I would be interested in designing Joey’s Sport Mod for the upcoming race at Hawkeye Downs Speedway.

By some miracle, Joey remembered the interaction with my mom and after tagging him in a concept design on Instagram he realized i was the same “son who designs cars for fun” that my mom mentioned six years prior. Joey went on to win the feature in the first-ever car design I had ever made, and we stayed in contact until Joey formed his [NASCAR] O’Reilly Series team, where in the second race of the season in Fontana CA, my dream came true and I had my first ever NASCAR design on track! From there, the rest is history.

6️⃣ The “Clippy” Chevrolet for Garrett Smithley commanded huge praise on social media, even garnering the attention of the Windows account. How did that car come to be, and why Clippy? 

The week prior to the spring 2026 Martinsville weekend, Garrett ominously texted me saying “So I have an idea” followed by a picture of Clippy. I responded that I understood the assignment and I set off to make a car I never expected would garner the attention that it did.

Garrett posted a picture of the rear bumper, which I followed up with a render of the full car and then things exploded. The “Clippy” meme coin community got a hold of it and were posting it everywhere and engaging so much I could hardly keep up. Mind you, I was at work at the time and was shocked to open Twitter to discover that the original artist of Clippy was now involved and supportive of what we were doing which is huge praise as a fellow artist. That was then followed up by Microsoft commenting on my tweet.

I figured the car would be popular because of the nostalgia factor and bringing the world’s two most famous paperclips together, but I never expected the response we got. And yet, through all of the engagement, there is still an Easter egg hidden on that design that it seems nobody ever found.

7️⃣ After achieving an impressive 100 designs on track recently, I’m sure you’ve learned many lessons along the way. What was one lesson you learned during your design journey so far that you felt was the most impactful to your career?

One hundred designs is a milestone I never thought possible. I thought I’d have maybe 10-12 cars on track, then fizzle and disappear which I was gonna be totally fine with. The dream was to get one. But after doing the amount of work I’ve done, one thing that is clear and important to learn is that even though the deadlines are tight, stress can get high, you cannot rush things or you’ll hate what you make and lose motivation to make more.

You need to care about what you’re making, and if you can’t get it right the first time, take a break and come back when you’re ready and try again. I’m guilty of having sent out a car I wasn’t happy with and it was sent right back. Thankfully, the team let me try again and we nailed it, but that was a huge learning moment to never settle for mediocre and always make sure you’re proud of your work.

8️⃣ After designing for over a decade, you achieved the dream of many and had your work featured in the NASCAR Cup Series. What did that sense of achievement feel like and where do you place that milestone in your career? 

I was walking through the campus of the University of Iowa with a friend on the way to get something to drink when I got the text from one of my marketing connections saying “Hey Jordan! Looks like you get a Cup wrap after all!” I was mid-sentence talking about something when I read that text and I stopped, pumped my fist to the point where I almost threw my phone, and just knelt down and wanted to cry. I scared the hell out of my friend who asked what happened, so I gave her my phone and she just said, “Oh yay!” which pretty bluntly summed up how I felt. Competitive car or not, JTD was going to be in the Cup Series and that was all I ever could have wanted. That moment of finding out I was getting a Cup car is my No. 1 milestone.

9️⃣ What do you feel could be the next design challenge for you?

I believe my next design challenge will be trying to find a way to make this my official job. Many people don’t know but I work a full-time job as a mechanic at Toyota, and all my design work takes place between when I’m not working, which is very difficult to balance. Having to respond to clients, “I’ll get on it after work!” instead of being able to tell them that I’ll get on it now always makes me nervous because they could easily go work with someone else. I’d like to make a real career out of it.

I also went to get back into making more designs just for the hell of it. Making concept designs is how I, and mostly everyone, got their start, but now all my time is dedicated to real-world work. I often find myself with ideas I’d love to put together but just don’t have the time.

🔟 Share a design tip for people just getting started.

Don’t be afraid to look like you don’t know what you’re doing. If you have an idea, make it! Find a way to get it out there into the world. People may call you stupid — and they probably will — but they don’t have to like it, you do.

Do what you can, whether it’s hand-drawn or fully 3D-rendered. Make a name for yourself and post what you like. The NASCAR design community is full of talented and supportive people who will help and provide answers to all sorts of questions you may have, and can help you get started down this path. Whether you’ve had 100 designs or zero, we all do the same thing and we love seeing each other succeed!