about me

My name is Jason Pamental. During my career I have been responsible for directing all aspects of interactive projects, integrating marketing, design, and business processes into a comprehensive solution. From shaping the initial project vision and developing the information architecture, to providing creative direction for the visual design and managing the implementation, I have overseen both the creative and technical aspects of interactive projects.

Prior to launching my consulting practice, I have served as Director of Interactive/Technology for (add)ventures developing interactive solutions for Fortune 25 and non-profit clients alike, and before that for North Sails as their Director of Web Services. There I was handling much of their public and internal web development, server infrastructure, data center management and more. Both roles had gotten to be a little too focused on the technology and not enough on design, so when the opportunity came to start my own consulting business I couldn't pass that up. North had also been a consulting client for years while I had my own business (Bathysphere Digital Media Services) providing some print but mostly interactive design and development.

Back in 2001 I formed Bathysphere with a few amazing people: Daniel Venditelli, Matt Taylor and Mitch Goldstein. We did some fantastic work for an America's Cup syndicate, North Sails, the Battery Park City Authority and others, but never really found the critical mass or right mix for it to take off. Happily, all three are still close friends despite the stress of startup life.

Leading up to the formation of Bathysphere, I spent a year as the Creative Director for TWI Interactive. My duties there involved overseeing the design of the New England Patriots website, the design of Tiger Woods' personal and foundation sites, designed and made presentations to the NFL, LPGA and worked on a number of other sites for some of the biggest names in sports. A great year, but not a great fit professionally. The stint at TWIi was the result of my previous employer, Temple Games, being acquired during the 2000 America's Cup. My role as Director of Interactive there involved designing sites and community portals for a 3D sailing simulator game featured on Dennis Connor's Stars & Stripes site and then on the main Louis Vuitton Challenger Series site as well.

When I'm not pushing pixels or causing some other sort of digital ruckus I tend to spend lots of time with Ellen, Trevor and Phoebe, and our fluffy companion Tristan – the fiercest Collie known to man. Riding a bike (still a recovering road racing junkie), working on my 1969 Porsche 912 (and driving it... lots of driving it), racing on a J/24 down in Newport during the summer, and posting lots of photos of the aforementioned activities tend to fill up my time.

About the site

I developed this site using Drupal 6 and a variety of contributed modules, and created the theme based on Zen and a sub-theme. While endeavoring to ensure that things validate and still work (well enough) in IE6 and other (ahem) restricted viewing platforms, I have focused on improving the user experience for the (much) larger percentage of my audience. That includes use of jQuery for image transitions, CSS3 for a richer experience full of rounded corners, gentle drop-shadows and fun little bonuses like the slight rotation of the image snapshots on the home page on mouseover. @Typekit has enabled the use of some great fonts for headers, body copy and even the nice handwritten look for the blog post snapshot on the home page.

This together has meant that all of the content is straight out of the CMS. No Photoshop effects or hard-coding required to update the home page or anything else when posting new content. Any new project posted only requires images to be uploaded full-size and then smaller versions are made automatically, and one 'thumbnail' version cropped to 250px square for previews. All of the styles and visual effects are created with CSS and jQuery, so it's quick to update and looks great anywhere from an iPhone on up to a full-size desktop monitor.

I haven't put in a mobile theme yet as i haven't really worked through a solution that I like (and it already looks great on an iPhone). But that's coming. Hopefully with iOS 4.2 around the corner I'll even be able to turn on Typekit support for iPad soon.

(For the curious that means that all told there are only 16 graphic files that are used in the theme, including social media icons, logo, favicon, a few buttons and a couple of backgrounds)

And for those who wonder what modules are used, here you go: addthis, admin_menu, advanced_help, ajax_load, autoload, cck, ctools, date, extlink, feedburner, filefield, flickr, formfilter, google_analytics, imageapi, imagecache, imagefield, imce, imce_wysiwyg, inputstream, jquery_ui, libraries, lightbox2, link, messaging, mollom, nodewords, notifications, oauth, pathauto, poormanscron, search_custom (my own module to customize the search form), shorten, site_verify, subscriptions, token, twitter, typekit, views, views_cycle, views_slideshow, wysiwyg, xmlsitemap.