Teddy Hwang

After several months of being on hiatus, it is with great pleasure that I bring this site back to life. I’m excited to be back.

Despite it being quiet around here, I have been extremely busy over the last several months. Having joined a great team, and touring Europe for 5 weeks with Erika in the fall, it’s no wonder I had so little time for this blog. Nevertheless, the dust has settled and I’m finally finding some stability after some drastic changes both in my personal and professional life.

Wait, who are you?

I’m an interaction designer at a company called Spheric. I do most of the design and front end development for the various Ruby on Rails projects we do. I aspire to become a respected designer within the industry and to eventually learn some programming as well. To learn more about who I am, visit the about page.

So, what are you going to blog about?

This site will be a basis for me to share my thoughts about the industry that I work in. Specifically, I hope to discuss and possibly give tips on a wide range of design topics including, graphic design, front-end development, user experience, and user interface. The blog will remain a personal blog and I may on occasion go on a rant, but I hope to keep that to a minimum. Most importantly, I want to use this site to connect with other designers and developers. There’s a lot of you out there and I’m looking forward to engage in some web-related discussions. I’m also hoping to connect with more designers in this year’s SXSW conference and this blog will be a nice place for me to point them to, if they wanted to learn more about me.

Some quick thoughts about the design

Having created the first mockups of this design back in September 2007, I have been itching to get it out into the open. It’s evolved over the months and I’ve been tweaking it whenever I had the chance. The design for the most part should be complete (some minor details need to be worked on) but if you find any errors, please let me know in the comments. The design is grid-based (grid is the new black). The header image is inspired by Mac OSX Tiger’s default wallpaper and the login button is mostly for my own convenience (though I do have plans to encourage my readers to register to the site in the near future). While I do my best to ensure the same user experience across all browsers, I encourage my readers to use Safari or Firefox (get the new beta while you’re at it). I recommend them because I use certain CSS properties which only those specific browsers have adopted so far (like many web developers, I cannot wait until IE6 is a thing of the past). I’m an advocate of web standards and CSS driven websites, but I will step outside the validation rules to use tomorrow’s technology.

The old site

I really didn’t like my previous blog. I wasn’t focused with my writing and I was just starting out as a designer back then so I didn’t know what I was doing. Despite my near-shame of it I thought it would be a complete waste to delete it permanently and so I have archived it. It’s a good reminder on how far I have come. For my ego’s sake, let’s pretend it never existed.