“Um… is this mike on?”

This is the infamous "Is this mike on?" first entry of my journal. I started building the new version of the PDIM website during this past Christmas holiday. Only then, I had the time to focus on the art direction of the site. My old website had been an outdated 3 years old flash site in which I am happy to have finally switched over to a powerful Content Management System powered by Expression Engine. I am hoping to land some new exciting projects where I can utilize EE. I was honored to win a copy of Expression Engine from a Photoshop contest I entered hosted by Veerle's blog (one of my favorite web designer) back in September 2006. Here is the winner's list from the Veerle's contest. If you want to see my winning entry, my entry name is under Hyunlab. Thanks to Veerle and Leslie Camacho from Pmachine, gave me the perfect excuse to revamp my old and outdated site with this EE license I won.

It was the carpenter's tale. Carpenters never have time to build their own houses because they are too busy building other people's houses. For 3 years, I had no time to build my own website or house if you will, but always catered to clients' projects and other personal duties. This website took about 3-4 months in the making. It would have taken me about 2-3 weeks if this website was the only work I had to do. I engulfed myself this past year or so in learning/building CSS based websites and past 5-6 months learning Expression Engine. It has been a very enjoyable experience. During the journey, I learned a great deal about building standard based websites and Expression Engine. This Journal section will serve as my personal notebook to document the stuff I learned about graphic design. I hope it will benefit you too. In the coming installments, I may even write articles in how I built this website. Better yet, if there are any part of this website that intrigues you, feel free to let me know about it and I can write about your requests. Anyways, there are still some work that needs to be done such as having a alternate light color background version for those of you who are not in favor of the trendy dark background and the archive section is yet to be added. I will make an announcement as they are completed.

The design inspirations and resources behind building this site were from various sources. What design inspirations were yours building your site?
1) Veerle of Veerle.duoh.com
2) Jesse Bennett-Chamberlain of 31Three
3) Simon Collision of Colly.com
4) Jeff Croft of Jeffcroft.com
5) Khoi Vinh of Subtraction.com
6) Expression Engine sites: EE Doc, EE Forum, EE Wiki, Jambor-ee.com and few other EE user content generated sites
7) Music of Matisyahu, Bumblefoot, Finley Quaye, and Goldfrapp set the groove of the workflow
8) Computer Arts Magazine
9) Bulletproof Web Design book by Dan Cederholm
10) Coffee and tee
11) My wife and our cat

Again, I'd like to thank Veerle and Leslie for the EE license. See you soon!