About

This is where we go crazy with the third person!

...or not.

Contact Me.

Quick Facts...

How THIS all started...

I first started making websites in the summer of 1999. My family and I were on our way to New York when we stayed for a month in Carrollton, TX. It was then that I was learning how to convert CDs to mp3s and so on. I was running a small, Real Audio site featuring my favorite alternative music on the side, on expage.com of all places :).

But I think the design thing started earlier than that. I recently began to think about the first half of my life and remembered one of those tiny pleasures you forget about 9 years later: that pink cellophane wrapped Sunday edition of The Washington Post, for not just the blue and yellow comic sections, but for the advertisements as well. I would open up the ones for Best Buy and Circuit City, and dream about a new printer, so that I could print brochures, magazines, etc. For what? I didn't think about it. I just wanted to make something that adults could make.

A few years later, my parents finally bought a new computer with a modem. Soon afterwards, my father found himself in between jobs as a consequence of the '97 Asian market crash, which absolutely devastated South Korea, and he was planning to publish his writing online (his website was www.nyilbo.com). So he purchased Sams Teach Yourself HTML in 24 Hours, and then I took it.

My first few websites revolved around music. Anyone else notice that fan sites come far and few these days? I had websites for Limp Bizkit, Our Lady Peace, Finger Eleven, etc. (For more of my questionable but delightful auditory pursuits, here). I also started a personal website called "Bittersweet" that became a fodder for pushing the envelope of my design aesthetic and skills.

In terms of content development, none of those really took off, as I would lose interest. My first major project was to create an extensive Real Audio archive. I was a very unstable 16-year-old, so if you ever get the chance to look at the archives, you'll see moments of calm overshadowed by sloppy diatribes. Remind me to never share the link with you! There were some fun times, especially when I got into an imbroglio with another site geared towards, get this, WebTV users. Yep, what a world back then.

So where am I now? I definitely want to generate enough income to pay for grad school, either in art, design, or theology. I'm focusing on just honing my eye and my hands to form a concrete personal style and aesthetic. These days I read a lot of designers' sites, keep track of websites that inspire me, and am learning specifically about elements that make a design work... things that I didn't see a few years ago, or even a few months ago.

What I Use

During development, I test things locally (on my imac) using MAMP. I handcode in TextEdit. I use Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and Flash to make things pretty. I open up WYSIWYG editors during validation (for the handy line numbers). If today is past August 15, you can begin asking for Wordpress as a Content Management System, for I will have mastered it by then. A Wacom 6x8 Intuos3 keeps me happy. I have a CanoScan, which isn't the best, but it gets things done.