Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about how the eastern and western styles are used together in fashion. Some of the results are incredibly beautiful: the contrast of the clean and geometric style of western design to the highly decorative eastern design.

Thinking about this reminds me of indonesian decorative art called “batik” which mainly is applied to textile.

The above flash movie is my attempt to create a batik drawing.

slide show: rockyou

playlist (mp3 player): projectplaylist.com

A couple examples of 2 features that are widely sought after by myspacers. Obviously, the above are not the only solutions available for these features, but from the way they look, they seem to work very well.

Lesson learned: start small. don’t try to build the next myspace (unless you’re completely confident that it’s going to fly. see tagworld.com that people hail as the next myspace). if you see a need while using a popular product, create the solution for that specific need.

When you use xml to provide data for flash, sometimes you want to have some html formatted text.

Unfortunately, xml doesn’t like this. If you use any html tag, the parser will see it as a new child node.

For example, you just want to use
tag to break a sentence into 2 lines. Flash XML parser will NOT see that
tag the way you (or html parser) see it, although if you bring it to flash, flash html text parser can understand it.

The solution is to use [CDATA[ … ]] inside your xml with your html code inside the [ ] brackets. This way, everything inside the brackets will be ignored by xml parser.

Here’s a thread at flashkit that deals with similar issue: hyperlinks in XML

I’m currently working on a site for Chicago Graduate School of Business who’s going to hold their 6th Annual Chicago Asia-Pacific Business Conference in October.

This is the finalized template for the site.  This site will have few more pages for Agenda, Keynotes, panel list, etc. which will follow this template.

My bro sent me this link today: http://dojotoolkit.com/ .

I’m not sure how it works, but the idea is very appealing. My guess is that we copy and paste the source code of the modules that we need and customize them for our projects.

Currently, I’m designing a site for a conference that a good friend of mine organizes.

In one of our preliminary conversations about the project, he told me how he’s very particular about what he wants and sometimes he’s indecisive. Both qualities yield the same result: numerous iterations that could prolong the project.

Initially, I was irritated by this, but the more I think about it, the more I realize that being particular is not a bad thing. In fact, striving for excellence is a very good thing.

This becomes a problem if the person who’s very particular about what he wants doesn’t know exactly what he wants or simple cannot communicate it well because then he’ll ask for list of few things, then upon delivery of what he has ordered, he would ask for more…and more.

Sometimes I feel bad asking for more from my designers because I hate making people do more than what they’re supposed to, but then there are times when they don’t deliver the kind of product that meets my expectation not because I don’t articulate what I want clearly, but because they just don’t put enough effort into it. They need a little push.

The tricky part is knowing when to give them that push. To maintain and improve the quality of our work while still respecting my designers time.

You’re designing a site with a propeitary font that you’ve created.  You’ve designed the comp in photoshop. Everything is looking fabulous. So you start coding your site.

Then you realize… you have to create images for every instance of text that uses your fancy font. What a pain in the neck.

Well… those days are over. Check out sIFR 2.0 which would render text with uninstalled font as flash and scale it to match the original font.

Today, in a conversation over coffee, a good friend of mine told me a story of a focused man.

He’s her co-worker. A while ago, she expressed her concern about this man, because this man is not very computer savvy and he doesn’t respond as quickly as other people in her office, who mostly are much younger than him.

Today she told me how this man achieved a good result after 3 weeks of focused effort, which would take at least 3 months for most people.

His secret is:focus.

In the morning before he begins his work, he would have a piece of paper laying on his neatly organized desk. He’d take out his pen and write slowly.

What he writes remains a mystery, but whatever it is, it keeps him level-headed. He knows what his advantages are and what his disadvantages are. He concentrate his effort on one thing that he has most chance of succcess in and follow through. He does the same thing over and over until it yields fruit that he desires. After he gains a solid ground, he would move on to the next area.

Reflecting on this, often times I find myself being trigger happy. Shoot too often without taking the time to aim. I need to find the inner peace and aim. …