I’ve been working to fix a lot of the errors on the site to make it cross-browser compatible, and there are still a few quirks. However, the page now loads properly in IE8 (but without any of the rounded corners on the content area and navigation buttons). Javascript is also slow in IE8 – but that’s IE8’s problem. It can’t help being itself. I highly recommend using either a webkit-based browser like Safari or, even better, the new Firefox 3.5 RC2. If you use that, you’ll even see drop shadows on certain objects across the site!

In addition, I’ve added the projects page, which has been missing since I revamped the place. It’s still a draft, but it will provide you with access to things like the Maple Story soundtrack and Golden Sun soundtrack. So, if you’ve been trying to get to those, you can now get to them a bit more easily.

Keep going »

Welcome to my new portfolio of design – The Jason Effect. Previously (as of five minutes prior to this post) it was simply a blog that I posted my day-to-day thoughts on. While it is certainly that still, I’ve revamped the entire site to bring focus towards a more professional portfolio. The site you see is the result of days of hard work creating and deploying a brand new website – something I hope to do quite a bit, since I’m looking for freelance work! (Yes, potential client, that plug was just for you.)

So please enjoy my new portfolio – although a bunch has yet to be set up, expect everything to be 100% complete in the coming days. I’ve already put up my most recent work, so take a look at that in the meantime. And if you’re a previous visitor wondering what the heck just happened to this site, read on for a full list of all the changes made to the locations of, well, everything!

Keep going »

The Jason Effect has always been my own personal repository of information, writing, art, and more – however, I recognized that I didn’t give the humble blog enough attention. It was time for a drastic shift in focus; the blog needed to change into something more.

Since then, I have redesigned the site from the ground up to work as a personal portfolio of design, photography, music and writing. The site hosts all of my latest work, and all of the previous work I feel is worth sharing, including my photography, artwork, novels and short stories, musical compositions, and graphic design.

I hope you enjoy looking at the site, browsing around and viewing my work, as much as I enjoyed recreating it into the new The Jason Effect. It took many revisions to wind up at its current incarnation, so I hope I’ve made something to be proud of!

The final revision - click to view the full-size version.

Previous Draft Revisions

Draft #1

The final design didn’t come in a day. In fact, I went through two other full drafts before deciding upon the style I wanted. In the first draft, I had gone for a cherry-red wooden desk with a typewriter at the bottom shoving out paper posts. However, although this design probably could have succeeded, it felt too tightly designed for me. I knew that, to live up to that design, I would have to embark on a journey I wasn’t fully prepared to do – the style no longer intrigued me.

Frustrated, I set out to define a completely new and radical style for The Jason Effect, based heavily off of the style of vector artwork present on sites such as Vimeo.

Draft #2

I had planned to create an incredibly detailed and colorful miniature world for a final design, but after I’d finished the initial draft I became torn between the two draft revisions.

Not entirely satisfied with either revision, I combined what I felt were the best elements of both – the wooden beauty and paper of the first draft, and the simplistic content area of the second draft. The result was the single-column layout with the horizontal top navigation of the final design. The content area was kept clean of unnecessary elements (such as what would have been complex perforated edges and artificial stylistic tears in the pages) to give the layout a simple, fresh look.

I’ve decided to undertake redesigning this joint to make it more focused on what I usually do in my spare time – writing, artwork, graphic design, and music. This will be a major redesign and I’ve been coming up with several drafts. The two I like most are currently competing with one another for my favor, in a ring of death no less. They’re quite dramatic, draft layouts…

This first design is quite similar in structure to what I have now, and doesn’t make any radical design changes. It does, however, go for a more detailed and realistic look. This design in particular is based heavily off of The Typist, my latest novel currently in its editing phase. At the moment, I’m debating whether or not to nix the sidebar menu and put it all on the bottom. I may even go with more radical interface changes, such as making the blog display only one post at a time, and then titles of earlier posts next to it. We’ll see what happens as my designs evolve.

This draft is meant to follow a more simple, vector-inspired style, not unlike Vimeo’s intro page. Originally it started out as a reworking of the layout of the first design, but I soon learned I didn’t have the stock imagery to make a realistic looking wooden bookshelf go down the center (which I may get and do anyway). I noticed that the flat colors I was blocking out looked kind of earthen, so I made a sky and grass, added some perspective, and began to build up a miniature world. The end result of this would be a hyper-detailed scale model of an environment with colors that pop and attract the eye in a cartoonish manner. The light bulb makes the whole environment look like a wee science model ;)… However, it doesn’t very well represent the purpose of this blog!

So, I think I’ll be retooling the first design to have the organization of the second design, and then rework that into an even more slightly different organization. I’m trying to make something that’s best for a portfolio and such! It really is time to rework and retool the way this blog works so it’s not so dependent on me actually posting my daily whatever, because in the end I’d rather this be a portfolio and repository of my work instead of a silly journal. It can be that as well, but only on the backburner!

As a devoted member of the Lehigh University Choir (and a proud Tenor I), I couldn’t help but frown when I saw their previous website, coded and created by my now good friend Will Frece, also a member of the tenor section. In an instant I offered to recreate the Lehigh Choral Arts website in full – the result is what stands today.The entire design was initially much wider, but ended up being scaled down to fit on 1024×768 monitor resolutions. Although there were some concerns about the content area being too thin, this ended up not being the case – and was, in fact, resolved with the use of the horizontally-oriented navigation, which has previously been a vertical sidebar.

The new Lehigh Choral Arts site is entirely expandable and prepared for a future filled with exorbitant amounts of content, information, and media surrounding the University Choir, Choral Union, Glee Club and Dolce, and the Choral Arts staff. I can only hope there is a bright future in store for this site, and for the choir department as a whole.

Click on any of the thumbnails to view a full-size image of the site.

Final Template + Main Page

Example page with images

LCA uses FancyZoom for image overlays