about jon ascher (me)i've been making art since i was a child. as a student at the rhode island school of design, i focused my drawing ability in the illustration program and evolved my sense of visual problem solving.
i had my first professional graphic design job in the late 90's, at a small company in san diego. i was hired primarily for in-house graphic design layout work and setting up files for pre-press, however it didn't take long before i was also creating original illustrations, that would otherwise have been contracted out. i have always found that my ability to create original artwork complements every graphic design job i have worked on.
in 2000 i was hired as an in-house illustrator and graphic support at san diego's w3commerce, a web company with a unique business model. w3 created web-campaigns partnering with many hundreds of small, large and global businesses, operating in a broad spectrum of markets. with our tens of thousands of websites designed from the ground up and maintained in-house, w3 boasted the greatest volume of interlinked unique urls in all of cyberspace.
because of the extreme diversity in content of our websites, i found myself creating whimsical cartoons, medical diagrams, taking product photographs and designing web page layouts, often in the same day. i even got to design the corporate homepage. once again, my job had branched far beyond the original purpose.
finally, i was able to branch into business development, when i drafted a lengthy and compelling business proposal for a new cluster of art-related websites. after a meeting with the company ceo, i was given the green light for the w3 artist project. i designed each of the twelve sites in the project, handled copywriting and editing, and served as the liason for the clients i recruited to be involved. the w3 artist project grew to include several high profile artist clients. this cluster was one of the most successful clusters of e-commerce sites we had at w3. thus, i won a $50 bet with the ceo, which he gladly paid!
currently i am living in portland, oregon. as time allows, i am working on a fully-painted graphic novel, for which i've also written the story and manuscript. the working title is “neil,” and and you can see some of the page art in the comic book art section of this site.
