Hi I'm Jeff! A creative designer based in Northwest Pennsylvania. I focus on creating structured, yet simplified graphics of publication, interactive, and identity design. I firmly believe in the popular idea of “less is more” and its process of minimalism.
The Northwest of Pennsylvania has three main large rivers in its area that are substantial for camping, the French Creek, Allegheny, and Clarion River. Coming from a long background of camping, this passion project originated from a publication design class, as a personal and commercially used guide separated across each river in 3 parts.
This series of large guides go in small detail from regulation and safety tips to towns and tourism. With these small components of detail, I wanted to lay a simple and high contrasted organization of information with lots of negative space to make the publication not overwhelming with its copious amounts of material. Hereby, I used a process of limited color and variety of thin and bold weights with secondary elements of topography lines to accomplish this balance of open space of structure.
publication — Project
2021
AIA Catalog
AIA or The American Institute of Architecture is a professional organization for architects in the United States. AIA focuses upon education, government advocacy, community redevelopment, and public outreach. This catalog was a project from a publication design class as a marketing and information guide. With the contrasting of dark navy blue and bright yellow, I stuck with a minimal geometric approach complementing the problematic challenge with only being limited to a 3-color pantone process. While the catalog is split into 2 parts, one visual, and one informational, I wanted to bring attention to the breaks of visual ease and the organization of body copy playing off one another.
publication — Project
2021
NASA Annual Report
NASA is the National Aeronautics and Space Administration agency under the U.S federal government. NASA is responsible for the civilian space program, as well as aeronautics and space research.
The 2020 Annual Report is an organized informational publication of yearly reports that relays information publicly to shareholders, documenting its activities and finances for the full 2020 year. While inspiring over a recently fictitious blended branding, of modern to old. I intended to create a simple, orderly, and futuristic publication that followed a systematic of grid structures and process of color overlays that separated each program into their own unit of color.
Chimera XIX
Design team — Art Director
As an annual tradition, the students at Edinboro University come together to create Chimera—an art and literary journal and exhibition organized almost entirely by students. The design team is selected based upon a faculty-juried system and the team works collaboratively to create a publication representative of the selected student body artwork. Pieces submitted come from a wide variety of mediums: paintings, sculptures, prints, metalwork, photography, design, literary, animation, and film. Along with being published in the journal, the selected pieces are also exhibited in a local gallery, ending with an annual soiree to celebrate the students and their work. With intent of creating something never done before visually and systematically.
Accolades- Selected as a winner in the poster series category for the Flux 2021 Student Design Competition
publication — Artist magazine / Literature Journal
2022
The Chimera artist magazine showcased more than 40 juried art pieces. While having design style inconsistency created through an assortment of artists, the publication was designed with a progression of clarity while being measured through interactive page markings. This methodical system was created and idealized by the art directors and executed by the team members, to create an organization paralleled through artist’s style and design style progressed through the entire magazine. This progression started with an abstract destructive style that was then retrogressed to a more minimal state, while maintaining a consistent brand created through gradients, program effects, and use of line and shape.
With being assigned one of the art directors of the design publication team, I had to create an easy style guideline that was used by the design team members to create the student magazine. While giving constant feedback with multiple rounds of revisions, all to then be finished on a tight timeline and be printed with over 500 copies and distributed across the entire student body at Edinboro University.
The Bangkok Thailand 2032 Summer Olympics bid logo was a corporate identity design class project. In this project I was assigned Bangkok Thailand, and had to focus on every aspect of personality, and what made Bangkok… Bangkok. With this I found inspiration in the gold and green colors sparsely found throughout the city in their own Buddhist temple architecture. The abstraction of the known “Giant Swing” of Bangkok Thailand, seen in the middle of the logo, was created with an artistic swing of motion and fluid brush-like curves centered with strong contrast of color.
Additionally, this abstraction was portrayed with an intent to relay a self-acting figure depicting an active moment relating to sports and athletics. With this logo, I really had to take a deep understanding of everything about Bangkok the culture, tourist attractions, people, transportation, food, markets, everything, and anything found in this vast city. With the variety of attractions, I really had to focus down which to me limited but helped the idea of the logo, because you could not fit everything in a single logo that personified “Bangkok” or “Thailand” altogether. In the beginning, I become overwhelmed the all the attractions and topics I could take this logo to. With many sketches and experimental drawings, I was able to capture a distinct yet familiar shapes that had multiple appearances making it dynamic. This captured development of variety and familiarity was overall what I was striving for. From paper rough to digital I was able to transfer my idea successfully and transform it into a finished rendition of Bangkok and the Olympic games, with the intent of designing towards the future of 2032.
Polska or “Polish” translated in the polish language is a cultural themed food truck that focused on the historical folk-art style found in Poland. A food-truck is a mobile large truck or vehicle that is equipped with cooking facilities that sells usually a themed or unique set of foods.
In this singular branding identity, the goal was to capture the polish culture with a modern variation of style that was accomplished through uses of solid blocked colors found in the packaging design. While only using a couple primary colors in the packaging (used to distribute perogies to customers) it connected directly to the primary color use in the folk-art culture. The box design can be seen as simple compared to the abstract floral design pattern found on the food-truck itself, that was used to create a large difference becoming the focal point in the entire identity design.
TNMOT or the National Museum of Transportation is the largest collection of transportation of its kind in the world. Their mission is to be the leader in protecting and interpreting North America’s transportation heritage. The museum itself has a variety of vehicles ranging in all different ages from trains, automobiles, to boats and planes.
With this branding identity, it was first started with a logo design that relates singularly to motion and the use of trails or lines to create a path, as all transportation must follow a course of direction. Inspired directly through train railroads, it has an even spaced three-line shape creating a type focused logo. With this logo feeling light and moveable, as shown in the animated logo, the brand guide had to lay attention to thin opacities of layering monochromatic image effects. While these effects are light the color palette itself is created to have a strong contrast of light and dark shown through the dark red and white, and the simplistic black and white combinations.
General Mclane School District Branding
Beehive Internship — Team Leader
General McLane School District offers four different public schools for students in Erie County, Pa. Although the District has now acquired numerous accolades and accomplishments to make all four schools some of the best schools in Erie County, the District has a rich history that has a big part in making General McLane School District one of the best things about Erie County.
BRanding — Logo Design
2022
The school district, with new management seeking for improvements contacted the NWPA Beehive of Edinboro University. The Beehive with a team of four upperclassman students (Jeff Leretsis, Alicia Fritz, Nicole Ellwood, and Mecca Ehrgood) interviewed and then created stylescapes, mood boards, and idea boards. This development then progressed to creating a brand guide, that finalized the vision that the school district wanted to present themselves as. From multiple revisions of sketches, logo presentations, and revisions the team then created a set of mascot's, logos, and a final presentation that previewed and created a guide on how to use the logo and branding that was created. From all the team members hard work and revisions with the influence of my designs, the final logo was created and applied.
"General McLane School District revealed its new look Monday morning. It freshened up its branding and logo with the help of Edinboro University's branch of the NWPA Innovation Beehive Network. A group of Edinboro students led by a General McLane alumnus worked with the school district's administration on the project. In addition to designing a new logo, they re-imagined the school's mascot and captures photos of the school campus and its students." Copyright Erie News Now. All rights reserved.
The timeline of the finished logo and branding to take place and surface across the entire school district is predicted to be finished in the next one to two years, consisting of signage, uniforms, stationary, website, etc...
Campovate a personal start up project; is an idea relating to renovating a campground’s digital appearances through monthly payments, in three different tiers of subscriptions. These different tiers have different numbers of revisions and products that can be done in a singular month with multiple concepts to ensure the customers idea is discovered and created accordingly.
In this website development the main goal was to create a welcoming, minimal, and friendly design style that was easily accessible to customers through good and high focal point user interface design. With this website’s large call to action in the header it provokes engagement that directly brings them to the subscription options focusing on optimal earnings. While sometimes early engagement of “buy me now” can scare off customers the use of the friendly illustrations and rounded almost childish font brings trust and ease, that is then explained comfortably in the next body section called “Our Design Ambitions” and throughout the entire website.
The Beehive or the Northwest Pennsylvania Beehive Network is a grant funded multi-university program that escalates certain universities main aspects such as design, business, and engineering.
With this website containing a variety of universities the branding had to be created and followed to represent each university with their own existing colors and style contained in a singular hive shaped block. These hive or hexagonal shapes are seen in the logo and website background itself. With these universities having such diverse styles the website and branding was created to be simple and minimal to show a coherent and yet understandable consistency. The website has a large use of white space to feel open and easy to navigate while creating a successful hierarchy and straight forward use of presenting the content about each university and their goal and contact information. While only having one large landing page for all Universities it also directs to the Edinboro University subpage that was created to show visually what the Beehive of Edinboro has and what aspects and goals they want to represent. The Edinboro subpage represents a blog, podcast, images slider showing previous clients, and the staff directory, which keeping branding and style consistency.
Web Design — Front-end Design
2022
eGear Website
Egear is a website created to direct you across a variety of different kinds of products, gaming organizations, players, and brands at the cheapest price. The website is targeted for mostly gamers or people that play video games that do follow certain gaming platforms, games, and organizations to find what has the most popular product at the cheapest price through different companies likes Amazon, Walmart, Ebay, etc…
While this website is packed full of all kinds of different information such as, price, names, products, brands, and many more, the style was to be simple and clear to not overwhelm the customer and to find what they want at the cheapest price in the shortest amount of time. With this goal the style is simplified in rounded blocks and thin lines that is complimented by the blue accent of text, image overlays, and buttons to show importance over other elements. This idea of importance is developed through many revisions of user experience to find what is the most important in the time frame and how the user can get to their goal the quickest. This was accomplished by using a system of hierarchy of importance shown by amount of discount, price, and image of the product. This discount was color coordinated and placed in the top left corner of the product tiles to be easily seen and to be efficient. The design style has a very strong grid structure that solidifies the entire website to be uniform and easily accessible and viewed across the viewer, while being dark in contrast to help with “gamer eye strain”.
Web design — Internship
2020
Presque Isle Passage Presque Ise Passage is a campground focused in marketing to rent cabins and accommodate RV campers in their park, while having easy access to the Presque Isle State Park.
The website redesign was created to have a goal in mind for more white space, simplicity in design, and easy accessibility to customers online. This was accomplished by having more unform equal spacing across the entire website and a variety of weight in fonts to create hierarchy in importance of header and subhead information. While this hierarchy was shown through bold and thin fonts, the grid structure helped organize the information of pricing, sleeping numbers, utilities, and accessibility to booking online. The contrast of the red buttons on white background of the page was able to create a call to action to be easily seen for the older aged target audience to cause less confusion and more accessibility across all pages.
