• notes

    • Born in Baltimore Maryland around the time a few fellas decided to have a walk on the moon, while another group of fellas decided to have a music festival in upstate new york, and did their own version of "walking on the moon".

      Moved to NYC in 1992, looking like I just walked on the moon, and now live in Williamsburg Brooklyn since 2000.

      This portfolio contains selected works from the past 20 yrs as a Graphic Designer, Art Director, Interactive Producer, Sound Designer, Composer, Photographer, and Developer.

      All Creative Briefs, Scopes, Schedules, UX/IA documents, etc, within this site, where written / created by me.

      I've coded and designed this site using ExpressionEngine, and bespoke CSS/HTML. It best viewed in an HTML 5 compliant browsers like Google Chrome, Safari and even Mr. Thick Fontypants, Firefox. The Flash player is also needed for the Audio and Video content (html5 A/V updates coming soon).

      Please feel free to contact me for any and all inquires at

      jason.merenda @ gmail.com
      tel +1 646 472 4284

    • influences & inspirations in flux

    • Not an exhaustive list, but a few highlights to better understand my general headspace. I'm influenced by and see sparks and tangents of ideas in everything from film, architecture, mathematics games, science, fashion, food, toys, video games, music, sounds, and the odd happenstance of life... just everything. I like telling stories and conveying moods with subtle minimalism in design, music, art and photography. I enjoy the control of minimilsm, but also have a need for chance and chaos. for I also find technology has often played a significant role in the interplay of these two ideas as well.

      Ideologically speaking i am inspired by people who put forth new ideas that challenge our understanding of things.

      I feel great kinship with people like Alexandr Rodchenko, el lissitzky, Bruno Munari, Nam Jun Paik, Otl Aicher, Richard Feynman, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Eduard Tufte, Marvin Minsky, Charles and Ray Eames, Al Jarnow, Ferran Adria, Hunter Thompson, Oscar Wilde, Douglas Adams, Raymond Scott, Bob Moog, Julius Von Bismarck, Daido Moriyama, Yohji Yamamoto, and Raoul Vaneigem. All of these characters in the game of life understood what the Japanese call "Mono No Aware" or the essence of things great and small in their work.

      With regards to Graphic Design, I am often inspired by the works of Franco Grignani, Giovanni Pintori, Anton Stankowski, Ladislav Sutnar, Armin Hoffman, Otl Aicher, el lissitzky, AG Fronzoni, Karl Gerstner, Wim Crouwel / Total Design, Yusaku Kamekura, Roger Excoffon, and studio Boggeri, many works of Modern and Brutalist Architecture, the fluid

    •   
    • shape and symmetry of Graffiti tags, Reid Miles who's album covers started my design curiosity as a tyke, and tDR and factory/saville record covers which later inspired me in my twenties, The Zurich and Basil schools, the whimsical work of THA / Yugo Nakamura, Vectorpark / Patrick Smith and so on. On Sound Design, I would need to mention influences such as the work of Alan Splet, Walter Murch, and Ben Burtt. As for Music, there just isn't enough time in the day, but for starters early sixties modal jazz, psychadelic, and exotica, 70's electro funk and brasilian funk, 80's post punk, minimal synth / minimal wave, and most importantly anything with mood over all else.

      Also thrown into this minimalist sensibility melee are Industrial Designers Richard Sapper, Mario Bellini, Dieter Rams, Kurt Naef, Artemy Lebedev, Eero Aarnio, Konstantin Grcic, Naoto Fukasawa ... Typographic Designers Weingart, Frutiger, Wim Crouwel / Total Design, Oded Ezer, Arabic Typography ... the Color Theory of Franco Grignani, Arnaud Mercier, Wim Crouwel / Total Design ... Films and Productions of Georges Méliès, Jeunet et Caro, Guillermo del Toro, Henry Selick, Wes Anderson, Tarkovsky, Gilliam, Wenders, Jarmusch, Kubrick, Gondry, French & Czech New Wave, the beautiful & subtle lighting of Henri Alekan, the childhood grandiosity of the sets of Ken Adam, the lighting exhibits of Olafur Eliasson, and Architectural works of Earo Saarinen, Zaha Hadid, Oscar Neimeyer, Terunobu Fujimori and many, many others...

      Hope that gives you a look inside. Thank you for visiting, and have a curiously wonderful day.

  • Initial Design Mock-Ups

 

project title

Socialistic Website

client

Socialistic

date

2012

categories

Website

primary role(s) for this project

  • Art Director

project notes

A quick design update for the Socialistic Website done on my last day with the group, to promote for Social Media week. However in the the group decided to wait for launch until the regrouped on the content plan.



 

project title

Twitter Events + Groups App

client

Client Confidential

date

2011

categories

App Pitch + Strategy + Art Direction

primary role(s) for this project

  • Art Direction
  • Design + Illustration
  • Initial Design Mock-Ups
  • Concept Development
  • Creative Direction
  • Social Strategy

project notes

An iPad/Tablet/HTML5 app proposal for the the twitter api to be expanded for events and groups. The following images display the Events and the Group Management panels.



 

project title

Minimal Wave Website / Forum

client

Minimal Wave Records

date

2010

categories

E-Com Website / Forum

primary role(s) for this project

  • Art Direction + Design
  • Creative Direction
  • Client Engagement + Management
  • Social Strategy
  • CSS + EE Developer

additional team members

Alec Cumming - Lead Developer

project links

View this link  View Website
View this link  Vinyl Magazine Archive
View this link  Website UI + Layout Documents


project notes

Designed and built a new E-commerce Website and Forum for Minimal Wave Records, using Expression Engine + FoxyCart + Twitter + Google Search integration. The website has been fully optimized and google indexed, in accordance with the most effective SEO methods.

The layout was partially influenced by the idea of the record cover, since many of these releases are records, and we wanted to make sure the record and the artists were clearly represented before anything else. Another factor in the design came from weeks of roaming through tons of classic 80s magazines like The Face (Neville Brody), iD (Terry Jones), and most specifically Vinyl (Max Kisman), the dutch music magazine that featured many bands found on the site. A few of the colors and other elements where influenced by the faded pages when looking at our old issues, and the 4 color printing of the era.

One highlight of the site is that many people can now put faces to the bands/records that they have known and loved over the years, and also learn a lot more about other things the bands were involved in.

Additionally the MW Forum was updated quite substantially to give the content some room and air. Now you can easily find and read through the thousands of post about the genre without straining your eyes.



 

project title

Climate Change App

client

Climate Central

date

2009

categories

App Pitch / Strategy

primary role(s) for this project

  • Initial Pitch Concept
  • Initial Design Mock-Up
  • Client Engagement + Management
  • Producer

project notes

Climate Central came to us for ways to display their complex climate change reports, that come from NASA in the form of very complex graphs and columns of data, into a much more accessible application for everyone to understand what changes are occurring, and how fast they are occurring.

At left are a few early concepts from sketches, for interactive apps pertaining to specific data around how fast the icebergs are melting, and the sea water is rising.



 

project title

Optimum Video Player

client

Optimum Online

date

2006

categories

Strategy / Redesign

primary role(s) for this project

  • Client Engagement
  • Digital + Social Media Strategy
  • Sr. Producer
  • Initial Pitch UI Concepts
  • Initial Design UI Mock-Ups

additional team members

Chris Gardella - Art Direction

project links

View this link  Project Timeline Grid (pdf)


project notes

Optimum were looking to bring their 10 year old video portal design inline with the newly emerging 2.0 world. For several weeks we reviewed their customers needs and patterns, within the defined demographic, and also reviewed minute positive and negative details of over 30 different video players available at the time, to come up with a simple but robust interactive video player that allowed visitors to tailer the player to their own needs, without letting the interface itself get in the way.

At left, Two frames from my Initial Concept Design & IA



 

project title

MTVNLand Website

client

MTV International

date

2005

categories

Website

primary role(s) for this project

  • Concept Development
  • LAMP / CSS Development
  • Technical Producer
  • Art Direction

additional team members

Kristofer Widholm - Lead Developer - LAMP / AJAX / XLST / Component Development

project notes

MTVNLand is MTV International’s Creative repository. It hosts over 10,000 videos of creative work done by all of the teams around the globe including the On-Air Promos, Teasers, Trailers, Promotional Materials, Commercials and so on. It also host all documents associated with the music, rights and other notes associated with each piece of content. The minimalist aesthetic here was done specifically to highlight the content, and not the website itself - the idea being “a glass of water”.



 

project title

Worldwide Campaign Portal

client

Motorola / MTV

date

2004

categories

Website / Pitch

primary role(s) for this project

  • Initial Pitch Concepts
  • Art Direction for Web Design

project notes

This was to be a fairly simple and easily maintainable gateway for introducing Motorola mobile phone owners, to the ringtones, wallpapers, games and other content created by the 15+ MTV International mobile teams around the world.



  • Audio (Requires Flash Player)
  • Audio track for the popup
 

project title

MTV Exquisite Corpse 03

client

MTV International

date

2003

categories

Art Direction + Sound

primary role(s) for this project

  • Concept + Strategy
  • Art Direction + Design
  • Music + Sound Design

additional team members

Amy Kim - Website Producer
Oleg Troyanovsky - International Campaign Producer
Large Animal - Flash popup implementation

project links

View this link  Site Defunct


project notes

We did the design and the music and sound effects for the MTV Exquisite Corpse 03 campaign website. Exquisite Corpse (aka Exquisite MTV), was the theme of the 2003 MTV Global Image campaign.

The goal of the website was to allow visitors to understand and watch where each part of the 16 different Exquisite Corpse videos came from, and also watch the full videos. Each video started with a color, and had 7, 1 second parts (for a total of 8 seconds). Each 1 second part being created by a different international team, then passed to the next, which were then "sewn" together.