Stucel

In the 1st quarter of 2009, website developers in Indonesia have made a tremendeous pace! Launched in the late February 2009, Koprol is rocking the microblogging genre for the locals. The bright guys behind this website is the well known Satya Witoelar and Fajar. Hmm, too bad we sold MoodMill last year, so we can not compete with these guys! But I let mr. Facebook and associates do the job instead, good luck Koprol :p

Second, Richard Fang’s Partee. This cool and talented artist that likes to read Twentea is trying to help indie t-shirt designer to display their work of arts (read here). Way to go Richard! Best of luck. I really dig the domain name.

Last but not least, it’s GantiBaju (means: change cloth), the clone of Threadless. Although I’m not a big fan of ‘similiarism’, but I’m really looking forward for them to get better, unique and breakthrough idea that adds something different from Threadless. GantiBaju is powered by iCreativeLabs, Aria, Anang & Ollie. Good luck guys!

I only have a few friends in the industry that studied design-related major, back in the university days. Take Kuswanto of Zeusbox Studio for example. He’s a great illustrator and icon artist. He surprisingly was studying biological stuffs and I guess it is obviously far from design.

Before I took a plunge to the design industry. I was a full time programmer and it was the only job type I ever wanted since day one as a computer science student. It was more like a dream come true.
Web design was just a hobby to me. Love the blended art, technology and the fancy things since the rise of the internet.

I never regret the decision for not studying design. Despite I’m really bad with drawing, I found out that having a non-focus / spreading speciality, could turn out to be a great benefits in the industry.

Based on my experience, there are three types of website developer (this includes designer and programmer), and here they are …

"Damn, why it’s so hard to design a website!" That’s what my friend said two months ago, when he was trying to design his studio’s website.

He’s a logo guy, packaging guy and branding guru; he can imagine and sketch all the things in this world beautifully with great speed (from high detailed robots, monsters, flowers, super heroes, to Lord of the Rings guys). But! When it comes to website design, he is slow and the result is awkward and odd. Holy moly!

Why? Why on earth this could happened to him? Why it’s so hard to do this 72 dpi thing with only couple of boxes, gradient and a bit of color scheme that is surely be a drop dead easy case to graphic designer degree guy like him?