One of the easy and economical way to promote new brand especially brand that related to Technology. Wearing or giving out T-shirt compare to other collateral items such as notepad. Well, personally T-shirt is most efficiency as marketing collateral.
Team has decided to try out our first Tee shirt design; well, it almost 4-5 years I’d never done any graphics or concepts for Tee shirt design.
Directly to the point that using “open source” as the main selling point for Joget. Well, people all talking about free stuffs, open source = free anyway.
Some people comented the front logo that located right-centered of the T-shirt, it was looked like Ironman’s source of power.
Well, his one look cooler!!
For the white design, Jack suggested to have the Smiley + elements related to process.
Nuthing fancy? Just another WHITE shirt… 
Pastor Julius Suubi was the 3rd pastor came from Uganda to had this Revival Prayer Meeting at our church.
It was posted few on our church website. But recently taken this chances to show how great is Lord’s mercy work among us through his disciple.
See how God touch her, and fill with joy and peace in her…
Please click here to view more photos.
2 weeks time to prepare booth design for Joget roadshow - Open Source Workflow at MyGosscon 2009.
I was given with typical booth size of 3 meter width x 3 meter depth. To save cost and time; planned it and make the idea as “simple” as possible so that it could stand out from the rest; although size of the booth was pretty small, as long the message has to be BOLD.
Few items were in my mind, one huge backdrop and one bunting; eventually there were planned to set up 2 LCD panels as product demo and flash animation.
A quick idea of how the booth designs suppose to look like.
However, asking around my supplier to get some contacts. I have managed to found a company called Artco International (http://www.artco-international.com/) who gave reasonable price.
Based with default sizes and started with some visuals.
Few options for bunting designs - KPIs enabling…
Finally, back drop panel using pop up series and final roll-up bunting design.
A culture for an IT environment, encourage not to use any brochure - so called solution with paperless signage. All materials and information has stored in CD-Rom. Well, total cost of the CD is only less than RM2.00.
On the roadshow, Joget booth with the actual display items. More picture from flickr.
It was more than 5 years never updated much on my website - johncreative.com. Portfolio was outdated, style sheet was old etc. Designer has lot of excuses for some reason, not to work or spend time on their own design; for myself I was too tight up with works.
So what has motivated me to revamp it; surprisingly I was ’stir-up’ by this font type — Harabara (http://www.dafont.com/harabara.font).
First in my though: “Ok, cool… let use it for my site!”
Furthermore, it was quite common to have one page business card as design theme; apparently, quite number of designers had done it such a way especially things were everywhere - Networks of Facebook, Twitter etc. (5 years ago don’t even have twitter!)
Finally, took me one night to put all icons together and fit with the nice background images. Nuthing fancy about, next stage will working on portfolio page…hopefully.
Most of my photos taken in RAW, spend time adjusting the exposure, brightness or contrast in Photoshop. The result after export to JPEG format, it just had some missing “feels” about them. Well, most of the prefer shots have to get some effects on it.
Lomography and High Clarity were my favorite effects to use especially for portrait.
Here was the Original Photo after exported from RAW (CR2).
It was taken during a birthday cum bowling events. To see more, click creadaq photography.
After touching up from Photoshop Lomo effects - See Tutorials from PS Tutorial
High Clarity effects - to make the photo more focus and impact. See tutorial from PS Tutorial.
If you looking for web design resources or references, I have these blogs to share with; it was like a main hub of information not just about web design, but photography, CSS coding etc.
So far, there’s many blogs and forum you can search and try to dig great stuffs. Well, I have “Filtered” them, and here I have 6 blogs provide great inspiration and ideas for my works.
Finally I have time to blog since traveled from this trip since June.
This mission trip was organized by my church (pkcmc.org). There were 12 of us on this trip, which sound like 12 Apostles. It was a first ever trip that experienced people of Thailand, and it was the longer travelling time on road – took almost 8 hours from Chiang Mai to Terd Thai (border of Myamar).
This was only highway to North, and we stopped by roadside for duck noodles.
Well, we managed to stop by some of the tourist attraction like famous Chiang Mai Hot spring. The place was huge and not many tourist around; we were the only group here.
This was the front entrance with 30 feet high water pressure spray from ground.
Nearly 10 hours journey from LCCT to Terd Thai, finally we reached center and already night 8pm local time, most of us were pretty tired and time to settle down our packing coz we had to wake up at 5.30am next day.
It was morning 6am and all the center’s children had settled down to praise the Lord together. Some of us giving the praise and worship performance and some testimonial; although we had different languages and there were a barrier, but some how GOD gave them wisdom to have someone did translation for us.
Yun-Nam Noodles, it only cost 20Bath (approximate RM2); overall it was unique (sources, peanuts, pork) and taste delicious.
Yau-zha-gua (油炸鬼) cost 1Bath (10 cents). It was crispy coz the size was only quarter of the original size we had in Malaysia.
Apart of that, roasted egg was new to us!
After we had our breakfast and it started rain again, but it didn’t stop us to go on our journey – to visit our beloved villagers.
Now I understand how useful we need a jeep with 4 wheels drive? It was the machine can overcome the mud (烂泥) and wet. This was the Jeep bringing the team up and down hill everyday.
Although it was 8km drive from Terd Thai town to Hill top. It took 30 minutes to reach Lau Wan village.
View from the top, it looked like Cameron highland. Weather was fine when we visited, if during year end and the temperature could fall down to 15 degree.
First impression when we reached the village. It was so much difference from the town although it was 8 km apart. They live in raised houses on low stilts, with a large porch leading into a square living area with a stove at the back. The roof is steeply pitched.
This was our church. And it was built since 2003. There were many churches around Terd Thai Hill, many of them were sponsored and donated by Malaysian Church.
According to my phone’s GPS way point indicate that another 10-15km will be reaching Myamar’s border. Never though of coming so close to this point.
Terd Thai has different Hill tribe, there were Lahu, Akha, Yao, Khamu etc. (http://www.chiangmai-chiangrai.com/hilltribes.html) and Lau Wan village was lived with Akha tribe. This tribe originated in Tibet.
Looked at my slippers- red mud had accumulated into 3 inches. The dirt and mud did not make me felt regret being this place, but my feeling was amazing while listening to the kids singing together with Pastor Daniel.
He wrote and sang all his song; most of the songs had healed those lost soul in this village. When he started to sing, children from village started to gather here and where they learned and sing along.
Each time we reached Lau Wan village, those innocent smiles has touched my heart and make me feel wonderful too. That was called spiritual smile.
I wish I could speak their language, to teach them how to manage and improve their living conditions.
More children picture from Creadaq.com.
One thing about Akha tribe, man did the cooking for guests. But woman taking care of their daily meal at home, coz man hardly cook most of the time.
I really respect the way they worked as a team and prepared the meal for us.
It was not first time I watched my mum killing live chicken. But this was first time I was watching live pig been ’sacrificed’. The screaming until silence, making my heart pumping so fast!
Akha’s dinner served! Where was the roasted pork?
We had great time with the children, we played games, and sing together. Once they got used to it, they start get closer to us.
Well, this journey has brought me a lot of messages. To understand and discover the other truth life in other part of this world, who need us to change their life styles.
God brought me here to listen, to feel, to see things that I had never seen before. To make sure things beyond us has appeared right in front of us. Through this journey, he gave us wisdom that what we should do when live in this world. We were stronger we become….
Lau Wan village and Children, I miss them. And may GOD bless them all.
Recently I was setting up a website for my church (PKCMC); and decided to signup the hosting package from 3ix (www.3iX.org) which only cost RM146 for 2 years.
One of the reasons I pick 3iX was because it has this “Fantastico”, Fantastico (wikipedia) is a commercial script library that automates the installation of web applications to a website. And wordpress is one of the features that had ready.
After installing and looked simple till I realized something not right when using Chinese Character and it display “?????”; well, I don’t have this problems on other blog (creadaq.wordpress.com). Searching through google and found out there were many type of answers.
Most commons from Wordpress Support, however, it doesn’t help and I keep on looking at some blog with the same file (wp-config.php) which it have this code…
define(’DB_CHARSET’, ‘utf8′);
define(’DB_COLLATE’, ”);
But it was working fine. So, don’t remove or replace it. It might corrupt your WP database.
Then I found out some resources about SQL database setting for WP. The main issue is that for most systems when you create a database, the collation is set at “latin1_swedish_ci” as default. You’ll need to change that to “utf8_unicode_ci” for all the tables where you plan to include Chinese characters in.
If you have cPanel, try look for mySQL Database or PhpMyAdmin
Well, first I though it was changed by just select it from the drop down. NO! There was many more to be done. Let me show the steps and screens. Please click screen to enlarge.
You’ll see something like this, might defer from yours as some plugins will add their own tables.
Anyway, on this screen, under the “collation” column, if you see latin1_swedish_ci, you’ll need to change that to utf8_unicode_ci!!! Click on the button 2nd from left on the column that says “Action”.
You’ll reach a page that says Structure as shown below, check everything that says latin1_swedish_ci, then click on the edit button which looks like a pencil.
You’ll reach another page like the one above, change everything to utf8_unicode_ci, then click Save.
Then, when you finished saving, go to the tab that says “Operations”.
Change again setting to utf8_unicode_ci, then press “Go”.
Repeat steps for all that are not “utf8_unicode_ci”. Make sure you click each of the list on the left menu.
Finally, you should be able to write in Chinese characters now. See pkcmc.org.
I think 2009 is the year of Twitter, it was hot and everyone has owned one account. Even our Malaysian PM- Najib has one, wonder what has he used it for, calendaring or his though of twitting it. Well, I was not interested to be his “follower”.
And surprisingly, I have seen some of them come with million followers. Anyhow, people has engaged it and realize there were some designers have created some beautiful icons and buttons for twitter, especially the Blue bird. Just lovin them all…
So, there were some nice twitter icons for downloads.
TMS had developed and approach another great application “tmsWorkflow“, to allow user to design their own workflow modules easily to mange the complex mechanism without any hard-code or special customization.
Well, team has decided to brand it as Open Source software and given a name called ‘JOGET‘.
What is Joget?
The Joget is the most popular traditional dance throughout Malaysia. It is performed at cultural festivals, wedding celebrations and other social functions. Joget (video) is a couple dance and the tempo is fairly quick with a feeling of teasing and playing between the partners.
The concept and idea of using Joget, it has interpreted an application featured with flexibility and dynamic. It was how the dancer’s movement and way of performance. I was using the styles from each of them, especially the hand of dancers.
This logo should also design for impact, reliability and exceptionality. The shapes embody the spirit of strength and cohesion. The various elements are unified into a central theme of strength and vitality, yet they remain unique.
The original logo displayed shapes of hands. The approach was already overused and the Olivedrab mixing well with yellowgreen color did express energy, dynamic, active, and represents the continuous movement that characterizes the applications.
Well, the team has decided the final logo’s font type and colors.
The logo displayed on the screen of application.
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