• 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.

  • Pitch

 

project title

PwC Website Pitch

client

DDB NY / PwC

date

2012

categories

Pitch, Website + App

primary role(s) for this project

  • Art Director
  • Design + Illustration

project notes

A few samples from the pitch for a financial services client who was looking to create a website and ipad like app around their small business services package.

Primarily I was tasked to come up with several design explorations / approaches for the layout of the site. As time went on we started focusing more on the App idea, and less on the earlier editorial idea, and I took several approaches including a Masonry layout and an App / Path direction.

DDB didn't have the opportunity to do the UX for the site, and needed work with the UX flow the client had already put forth, but it turned out ok and the client really liked the final results. An interesting "gridnik" and infographic based project overall.



 

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

McDonalds Digital Future

client

TBWA / McDonalds

date

2009

categories

Strategy / Pitch

primary role(s) for this project

  • Initial Pitch Concepts
  • Creative Direction
  • Client Engagement + Management
  • Digital + Social Media Strategy

additional team members

Sean Branin - Initial Design Mock-Ups
Florian Fangohr - Initial Design Mock-Ups
Lucas Kim - Initial Design Mock-Ups
Jean-Paul Tremblay - Initial Design Mock-Ups

project notes

TBWA approached us to create a pitch (in 1 week) for what the near future of McDonalds online could look like, to be included as part of their larger Global Pitch for the brand. I started by sketching out everything that we know about McDonalds, from the original store, through their heyday in the 70's, up till now, and then some.

With transparency being one of the most important directives for companies globally these days, one idea was to convey McDonalds products, and all the data for each product, to be placed in very clear and concise display, and then to give each product it's own hero shot, similar to the great product design layouts of the 60s, like Braun, but in the tone and style of McDonalds.

With this same idea, you would also need provide and interesting way to search through all of the content, that would help visitors sort through all the content quickly, and even suggest similar content when appropriate.

Secondly, we wanted to capture what McDonalds meant emotionally to most people as a brand, by letting visitors connect with all the ephemera, and even americana, that existed in the real world for the brand, be it on Flicker or Facebook or other social platforms. There are thousands of objects.

Lastly, I wanted to explore the interesting food on the menu that I had noticed during my travels around the world (and even in the US, with the Lobster Roll in Maine, and Crab Cake Burger in my home town of Baltimore). As we researched this further, we were fascinated to find just how many different items there where (like the McCurry, or McFalafel).



 

project title

Goldsmith & Co. Website

client

Goldsmith & Co.

date

2009

categories

Website Pitch / Strategy

primary role(s) for this project

  • Client Engagement + Management
  • Digital + Social Media Strategy
  • Initial Pitch Concepts
  • Creative Direction
  • Processing 1.0 Renders

additional team members

Lucas Kim - Initial Design Mock-Ups
Sean Branin - Initial Design Mock-Ups
Florian Fangohr - Initial Design Mock-Ups

project notes

With this pitch, we presented several ideas in tandem with narratives I created around the company’s brand and identity. One concept, From Many to One, is articulated below, and follows the more common ‘gridnick’ perspective, while another was created from a purely aesthetic perspective around the ideas of angular principles of modern freeform architecture.



 

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.



  • Video (Requires Flash Player)
  • Discover Your Epsonality Sizzle 
 

project title

Discover Your Epsonality

client

BSSP / Epson

date

2008

categories

Strategy / Website Design

primary role(s) for this project

  • Client Engagement + Management
  • Concept Development
  • Digital + Social Media Strategy
  • Sr. Producer

additional team members

Zander Brimijoinn - Art Director, Concept Development
Daniel Scheibel - Lead Developer, Concept Development

project links

View this link  Website
View this link  Merlin Project Schedule (pdf)
View this link  Site / Page Map (pdf)


project notes

Epson and Butler, Shine, Stern & Partners approached Big Spaceship to create the interactive branch of their Discover Your Epsonality campaign. The result was a whimsical world where visitors could discover their Epsonality, using a fluid and intuitive — yet non-linear — interface, based loosely on the the idea of a pseudo-science lab… as imagined inside the visitors head of course. This “simple” idea was culmination of several weeks worth of abstracting vast amounts of not very friendly spec sheet data, to create an algorithm that tied “character traits” to each printer function, which emanated into a “persona” — known in this world as an Epsonality — for each printer. Now that we had paired printers to personas, and created the “brain” of the site, we were then able to create the world of whimsy known as The Epsonality Lab. A piece of cake!



 

project title

The Corona Beach

client

Cramer Krasselt / Corona

date

2008

categories

Website / Digital Strategy

primary role(s) for this project

  • Sr. Producer
  • Client Engagement + Management
  • Digital + Social Media Strategy
  • Initial Pitch Concepts
  • Tertiary Design

additional team members

Zander Brimijoinn - Art Director
Daniel Scheibel - Lead Developer

project links

View this link  Project Brief (pdf)
View this link  Website "Ideology" Pitch - Principles of Relaxation (pdf)
View this link  Merlin Project Schedule (pdf)
View this link  Loader Sequence Fun (pdf)


project notes

Cramer-Krasselt approached Big Spaceship looking to bring their iconic Corona image and TV campaign, of the serene unexploited Corona beach, into the digital world. As the Corona brand has a rather large fan base in the real world, we also had the dual goal of connecting to Corona fans through common social media platforms. The task at hand was quite a difficult one, in that how do you give visitors a clean and realistic beach experience, and have the best of today’s social mediums all in one place, without cluttering the beach. The result of this excursion was to create two connected “worlds”, giving ample space for both the serene and complex, as well as an ongoing rotation of “easter egg” like activities to keep users coming back for more, and inevitable push Flash to it’s very limits in every way possible.



 

project title

30 Days of Night / Game

client

Sony Pictures

date

2007

categories

Multiplayer Flash Game

primary role(s) for this project

  • Client Engagement + Management
  • Concept Development
  • Sr. Producer

additional team members

Dave Chau - Art Director, Concept
Josh Hirsch - Game Developer
Ben Templesmith - Character Design

project links

View this link  Play the Game
View this link  Creative Brief (pdf)


project notes

While achieving an absolute sense of realism for the Site, we wanted to do something very different with the game. With this creation we went straight to the graphic novel for inspiration, and even worked with the novel’s Graphic Artist, Ben Templesmith, to create the 3D characters. As this site used age verification, we were allowed to go all out with all the blood and guts one could imaging form such a novel as 30 Days of Night. Gameplay consists of battling your way through 30 nights (levels) of gameplay, playing as either humans or vampires, with the goal being to escape with your life.



 

project title

D21 Website Redesign

client

Design 21

date

2006

categories

Strategy / Redesign

primary role(s) for this project

  • Client Engagement + Management
  • Digital + Social Media Strategy
  • Sr. Producer

additional team members

Chris Gardella - Art Direction

project links

View this link  Design 21


project notes

When we were approached by D21, they had started to outgrow their original website, and wanted something much more robust, flexible, and easier to maintain then what they initially created. Their site needed to support vast amounts of cross matched data, that had dozens of complex connections to each others categories. Our task was to make them all of this look elegant and un-intimidating, which I feel was accomplished quite well.



 

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.