Soup Shoppe is a local eatery in my hometown very well known for its upscale food creations. The owner, Brian Moscetti, makes and serves nearly sixty different types of soup, six per day, on rotation throughout the year. In a world where Panera is right next door, Soup Shoppe needed an extra push to give it an edge – which was when they realized that Soup Shoppe had no website.

I was approached with the task of creating a usable, clean website for Soup Shoppe in order to showcase their foods and present their menus to potential customers. The website would be a portal for ordering via phone and fax, as well as a place to request catering estimates and start conversations with Brian and the rest of the Soup Shoppe staff.

Needless to say, that goal was accomplished – and then some. I even went in one morning and spent two hours doing a photo shoot of the restaurant and its food. Its delicious, delicious food. The result? A delicious, delicious website.

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

As freshman students in the Integrated Business and Engineering (IBE) Freshman Workshop course, which I colloquially refer to as product design and development, we were first tasked with creating a logo that we thought would best represent our IBE class. The best logo, selected by the professor and a panel of “judges” (aka our TA’s), would represent our class of IBE.

Although there were some fine contenders, the logo to your left emerged victorious. The prize? Our entire class received a drawstring tote bag with the logo printed upon it. Oh, and we got a box of Oreo cookies, too. Yum!

Final Revisions

black & white logo

color logo

It’s been a while since my last post, and boy have I been busy – finals rushing toward me, projects about, specifically for IBE Freshman Workshop. If you didn’t read the post below this, Venti is the name of the team I’m on. Myself and three other students have formed a mock company and created a aesthetic prototype of our product. Today, we are releasing a full poster of information about Venti – the culmination of all of our research. Please look at the poster! It’s one of the nicer projects I’ve done to date – I’ll be making a matching keynote for our group to present to an audience of mock investors on April 23rd.

The style is taken directly from the Venti website, enhanced and updated. The Venti website will be receiving a similar update with information and graphics from the poster, as well as a link to the poster. Make sure to check the Venti website soon for the update, because it’s going to be massive! This poster has provided excellent material to build off from – especially for our group’s presentation.

By the way, thank you everyone for sending me emails about Hide and Seek. Its just a huge pleasure to learn that so many collegiate groups are interested in using my transcription, and I encourage you all to learn it and record it!

In addition, to those of you emailing me about the Maple Story Soundtrack, I will be updating the tracks this weekend with new tags to get rid of and sort the unknown tracks. However, once I do this the soundtrack will no longer be updated – I’m through with that thing. I really should be focusing on updating my portfolio and redesigning this site (especially after seeing my friend Kyle Wynen‘s new blog).

It only took me several years, but I’ve included a favicon at last onto this blog. I can’t believe I never did. I think it’s a pretty nice favicon as well!

It matches the site and will probably even look great on an iPhone or iPod Touch. So, with that off my chest, I’d like to announce my latest work – I’ve been doing quite a bit of work for IBE Workshop, a product development class I’m taking the semester. The product my team of four has been tasked with developing is a humidifier for vehicles such as cars and trucks. I’ve created a brand image and company identity for this product – I call it Vënti. And we’ve got a website, too.

Vënti will, with any luck, be the most versatile humidifier for any vehicle out there – but we’re still making big changes to the device, and we’ll have a working prototype made by the end of the course. I’m actually incredibly excited to see this amazing yet simple device come to life after the entire design and development process. We’re moving forward into business at the moment, so I’m pretty much settled on a design for the product. I’ll have much more to show about Vënti in the coming weeks, so watch out for that!

On the side, I’d like to mention that I’m 20% through editing The Typist! I’ve never gotten this far into editing a novel before. I’m going to finish this one, I swear it! The writing is actually half-decent – better than any novel I’ve written thus far – so I think it has real potential.