A good friend of mine shared this article with me today. It was so shockingly accurate, I felt that it was my duty to share it with all of you. It’s just a little bit of insight into the world of web designers dealing with some very special clients. ;)

Here you go!

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.

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