I recently started reading a book about micro lending by Muhammad Yunus who won the 2006 Noble prize for starting Grameen bank that lends money to empower poor women in Bangladesh. A very inspiring book.

This evening I was doing research on potential invesment opportunity. Since i want to invest in a business that would make this world a better place, I started to do research on micro lending.

One of the sites that I found is Kiva.org which uses the power of the web to create an interpersonal connection between entrepreneurs who are in need of micro loans to anyone who would be interested in helping them out. The system works very much like child sponsorship programs. Brilliant.

Web 2.0 is about empowering users and creating community. Kiva.org is a perfect example of that. It might not have the “cool” ajaxy GUI, but it definitely creates a great experience beyond the screen interaction. It creates the kind of experience that gives meaning to life.

To make this site more useful, I have installed a plugin to aggregate feeds from my favorite blogs on various subjects that I normally cover on this blog.

Please note that from now on, most of the news articles displayed here comes from another site as I shift my role from author to editor.

Naturally I can’t take credit for most of the articles displayed here, which is why there’s a link to the source where I the full article is hosted. Driving traffic back to those sites is my way of thanking these great writers for their contribution to the community web/design community.

That was a line in the first song we sang at church today.

The idea intrigued me.

Life is beautiful. I agree.

But… how about MY life?

Is my life beautiful? 

What would make one's life beautiful? 

Not too long ago I saw Zach Barf's movie where he cheats on his pregnant girlfriend. It was an ok movie, nothing bad or really good. However, there was one line that sticks with me.

"You only fail if you stop trying."

Cliche. could be a form of self-denial, but… that could also be true.

Couple days ago, I had a conversation with my manager about prototyping.

The objective of prototyping is to fail as many times as possible, as fast as possible.

It reminds me of something that I read about a tip for learning Go(a strategy board game) that a japanese master gave his student. He said that to master that game, the student needs to find 100 ways to lose as fast as he possibly could. 

The reason is to learn from our mistakes and rule out possibilities. If we fail early, we wouldn't invest time in something that doesn't work. 

So failure is a way to provide direction. 

…is to make tangible what's inside one's heart.

Footnoted.org , one of the first sites that I've ever created, has been awarded by TIME as one of the 50 coolest websites.

Michelle Leder, the financial reporter who runs the show, deserves this recognition for all the works that she's put in.

This site has very interesting information regarding various companies' footnotes which could easily get buried under other information (often times intentionally) but could be a great indicator of the way the companies are run. In other words, hard to find information served in easy to diggest form.

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.

How one sees things affects how one does things.
Therefore understanding how we see our role, as creative professionals, is essential.

I used to consider myself as web designer because I see my role as someone who designs web sites.

As we all know, in the early days of web design, web sites were basically just brochures on the screen. We borrowed a lot of conventions from graphic design.

Interactivity was not very important because it was very limited. We could only interact with the sites by clicking on links, images or fill out forms. Web sites were merely a digital “choose-your-own adventure” brochures. An electronic indexing medium (which is why the “home” page was named index.html).
Fast forward to present day. We have 2 big things in the web design world: AJAX and FLEX. Neither one of these are new technology. They’re just new ways of using existing technologies.  One uses DHTML and the other uses Flash. Both use XML for data and work in similar fashion underneath the surface.

Why are these important?

Because they allow users to interact with computers in more ways than just clicking links. Interactions have to do with self-expression. The (relatively)new forms on interactions allow users to be more expressive which could potentially be used to create a meaningful inteactions between an entity (i.e. a brand represented by a web site) and its audience.

An important part of designing a web site is to make sure that it shows consistent look and feel. It needs to look and feel just like other manifestations of the brand that it carries.

Now that the form of interactions between user and digital media become more complex, consistent look is not enough to maintain the same feel of the brand.

For example, we have a web site targeted to sophisticated adults (i.e. Bose) that uses interaction models similar to Disney (bubbly, playful, hyperactive). The sophisticated look will feel Bose, but as the users interact with the site, they won’t feel like they’re interacting with Bose.
It’s like going on a date with a very classy lady who act like a 5 years old.

Going back to the first line of this entry, the role of web designers has evolved because web as a medium has evolved.

We do more than just translating brochures from paper to screen. We need to design how the site behave. Experience is the key word here. That’s what we design. Not only the look.

Another dating metaphor: going on a date with a gorgeous woman who curse you every five minutes creates an experience that you don’t want to remember.

A good experience encourages users to experience more (just like a second date).  This is how a steady relationship is formed.