Whoa! Bet you never thought you’d be seeing this. After a few months of deadness, I’ve come back and updated my portfolio to include a bunch of my artwork from my AP days. I also come bearing the news that I’ll be switching majors at Lehigh come fall semester – I’m moving out of Integrated Business and Engineering, and into what I consider more true to my passions – Product Design (aka Industrial Design). There I’ll finally get the hands-on experience I want to have to build and create products in the future.

To celebrate my monumental decision to change majors (I nearly transferred schools!), I’m going to give this place a good sprucing up. There’s some code that doesn’t work, and the placement of the search bar has driven me mad for a while. And just look at the footer! A travesty. Well, I’ll fix that – and then some.

My updated portfolio contains selections (the good ones, anyway) from my AP portfolio. You can check it out under the “Artwork” section of the Portfolio tab on this site or click here!

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.

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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!

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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!