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.

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!

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.

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!

Venti was the brainchild of Megan Cain, a quick-witted woman who could always see what people wanted. Megan’s idea for a simple humidifier that could fit anywhere inside of a car was one of eleven ideas that made it passed the planning stage in my product design and development course (or “IBE Workshop”). I was assigned to the Vehicle Humidifier team, working with Megan Cain as well as two other classmates, Jen Pinga and Alex Lee.

Together, we built up the product you see to your left. After several sessions on various chalkboards discussing the benefits of each design, we settled on a cup – and from there I developed a final design, name and logo, and marketing campaign for the product.

The result? Venti was the most recognizable name in the class by the end of the semester, and everybody knew our slogan and our product. The distinctive, clean art style of the product’s site, marketing and poster prevailed. So, hats off to the Venti team – great work, guys!

If you’re curious about Venti, have a look at the technical poster below. It will tell you how Venti works, more about our design and mission, and even lay out our financial model for Venti success.