About A Girl

Once upon a time, in a faraway land, there lived a girl who had been drawing and doodling as long as she could remember. But, like other good stereotypical Asian children, she aspired to be some sort of scientist or medical personnel. With great encouragement from Pa and Ma, and tremendous help from her science and math teachers throughout school years, she decided to study graphics art. She moved to a foreign land rumored to be full of opportunities, known as the USA.

Then one day, a one-time consulting gig led to contact with a group of design professionals from MindSpring Enterprises. Soon, the girl began working for MindSpring Web Design, a budding department in the well-loved ISP. Her job was to basically do what needed to be done, be it a line of code, a piece of GIF image, or layout for an entire site. She enjoyed her work and admired the talented colleagues, and continued to do so when MindSpring merged with EarthLink, Inc. Her roll in the "new" company evolved and expanded, as the department became an in-house interface design group. She learned new skills and techniques, largely from those she worked with. She discovered she had a knack for icon design, especially the glossy, early iMac style. She became the go-to icon designer and was know for her clean, crisp, "Web 2.0" interface.

Earthlink began shifting its focus from innovation to maintaining its existing "best selling" products and services. While this was respectable, the girl felt she needed a new opportunity, one that would allow her to continue to create and experiment. She accepted a job offer at ModoSports, an online game startup. While her tenure there was short-lived, it was fun and completely different. She worked on something she loved, but never got paid to do - cartoon characters. She became familiar with virtual world and game production.

Now at a crossroad, the girl continues to experiment on her art, in both digital and analog formats. She is still learning. She still doodles and draw cute things and hand-codes HTML and CSS files. She isn't sure which way she is headed, but perhaps you could point her to the right direction.

(To be continued...)