Though known for his caustic wit and spontaneous charm, Jayel Aheram suffers from an overwhelming excess of personality. He is a photographer and a hopeless Flickr addict. He is a compulsive writer and often writes about his latest creative endeavors in his blog Aheram Takes On... He is a product of an international upbringing; at home anywhere from the land of the Rising Sun to the sun-scorched dunes where the ageless Euphrates roll.
His work has been featured in many online and print venues, most notably Rosie O'Donnell's RBlog, the Italian cover of Warren I. Cohen's best-selling book America's Failing Empire (Gli Errori dell'Impero Americano), and the cover of the March 2008 issue of Vision Magazine.
The Blogger
I launched Aheram Takes On... in early 2005. The blog has been through two design changes, three coding overhauls, and five different purges. In its current incarnation, it is a chronicle of my creative spirit creating, making, and living; a celebration of things that I value and an insight to my creative process.
I have been blogging on and off since 2000, but it was not a serious venture until early 2005 when I launched Aheram Takes On... It is part-art blog, part-journal, and mostly about me. It is nearly always all original content of my own creation, but I will occasionally feature deserving artists.
The Photographer
I am woefully ignorant of the history of photography and as much as I regret to say this, I cannot say I am influenced by any of the great pioneering masters like Ansel Adams and others. My work is neither an emulation of a particular style nor does it assume to present a specific policy. It is an exercise in extrospection, a documentary of the world and its people as I perceive it.
Early 2005 was full of new beginnings for me. It included the launch of my first serious foray into blogging, my enlistment with the Marine Corps, and the adoption of a new hobby. I woke up one morning deciding that I needed something new to occupy my time, something creative. Painting first and then photography came to mind. My interest in photography was piqued partly by my friend Sachenka Brinkley, an amateur photographer. A Flickr account and a new camera later, a career was born. In February 2008, Cat's Eye became live. It is my professional gallery which I use to highlight selected works and portfolios.
The Web Designer
Any concept for a website that I create first sees light in the pages of my notebook. The name usually comes first (sometimes later), but there would always be goals written for that site. Design goals varies depending on the content it would have. At least, that is the ideal. I have sometimes allowed the design element of the website to take precedence over its content, to the detriment of both. It is difficult line to toe, balancing my enthusiasm for style in a website without compromising its substance.
My first website was a monstrosity created with Microsoft Word and featured epilepsy-inducing animated .GIFs of Dragonball Z characters. My first attempt at hand-coding HTML was Aheram's Seemingly Average Page and Other Anime Stuff, spurred on by my sister's early adoption of Notepad as her HTML-editor. Her design esthetic greatly influenced me, especially the way she built her websites. It was always a marriage of content with its design, a harmony of code and visual art.