I really enjoy cre­ative process

$1 cost $5 sale 20% mar­gin by Guy Kawasaki

I totally agree with ‘Safe is Risky’ in any busi­nesses whether its start ups to dinosaurs.

Today, I have com­pleted this course and received my first Cer­ti­fi­ca­tion of Com­ple­tion from Lynda.com.  When I first began Lynda.com few years ago, the first course I took was Deke’s Pho­to­shop One on one, although the course was very well com­pre­hen­sive it was really a dif­fi­cult to sit and watch each episode because it was mostly about the basics of photo edit­ing and edit­ing tools while I wanted to learn more of the web design­ing skills.  It was like read­ing a bible from page by page and I began to loose inter­est.  Then I began tak­ing HTML Essen­tial Train­ing, although this was more of what I wanted to learn but the exer­cises and the built in project was too bone dry bor­ing which I guess makes sense for begin­ners but still too bor­ing for me to stay inter­ested.  I wanted to learn fast and start build­ing my own projects as I learned through the courses but it was really hard when try­ing to learn the bare basics while want­ing to do more advance level devel­op­ment.  So nat­u­rally I gave up and can­celled my mem­ber­ship with Lynda.com

Then few month back I was brows­ing through Lynda.com and what caught my atten­tion was this newly released ‘Word­Press 3: Cre­at­ing and Edit­ing Cus­tom Themes’ by Chris Coyier which was exactly what I was look­ing for and so I renewed my mem­ber­ship again with Lynda.com.  And look at where it got me now, I have built a ‘Com­ing Soon’ page for my Beetchup and work­ing on a fully func­tion­ing web­site to com­plete the site. In addi­tion, I started a new project called ‘Mono World’ which I had in my mind for while but I’ve been hold­ing it off due to lack of knowl­edge and con­fi­dence to cre­ate a new theme suit­able for WP3.  Of course I had to hop around HTML Essen­tial Train­ing to CSS, Typograhy, JavaScript and jQuery again but it was a lot eas­ier because I was hav­ing a lot of fun learn­ing while build­ing my own project with a bet­ter focus and guid­ance.  So finally I have com­pleted the course but for sure I’ll be going back mul­ti­ple times to cre­ate my new projects with­out quit­ting again.  This time around Lynda.com is worth every penny.

Over­time from oury­at­lan on Vimeo.

Should I start from scratch or should I use what I have and try to improve it?  I don’t know how other designers/artist find their inspi­ra­tion to design some­thing so unique and orig­i­nal. I just search for great exam­ples that I want to turn into my own.  I don’t want to just copy or forgery but how can I make some­thing my own from some­thing that I really want to cre­ate with sim­i­lar impact that I want to achieve for my design?

For exam­ple, after doing some googling for ‘Best Com­ing Soon Page’ I stum­ble upon to this site http://amenhq.com/ and felt a huge impact that this is what I think will be well suited for our ‘Com­ing Soon’ Page. It so min­i­mal, mem­o­rable, and sends out a mys­te­ri­ous mes­sage mak­ing the user want­ing more ‘Viral­ity’.  How can I do this with Beetchup and develop into some­thing of my own?

So how about this? Is this a forgery?

I like it but I can’t use it, I need to do some­thing more original.

This is my answer.

It’s inter­est­ing how much crit­i­cism I’ve been get­ting from my part­ners which I felt kind of dis­ap­pointed.  They point out that fonts needs work, too much text, the pic­ture is ugly, and my favorite ‘I just saw the web­site, it looks like wall­pa­per inside a mid grade hotel in soho’ ouch.  My whole point of build­ing this site was to col­lect data from poten­tial cus­tomers and hon­estly it kinda of made me feel bad about spend­ing hours learn­ing to build some­thing that I believed to be pretty cool.  Then again, what they have pointed out were valid crit­i­cism and real­ized I was blinded by my own ambi­tion, I became an ass of my own work.

One of my favorite author Seth Godin posted this pre­vi­ously in his blog:

So the chal­lenge, as you con­tem­plate your next oppor­tu­nity to be bor­ing or remark­able, is to answer these two and a half questions:

1.    “If I get crit­i­cized for this, will I suf­fer any mea­sur­able impacts? Will I lose my job, get hit upside the head with a soft­ball bat or lose impor­tant friend­ships?” If the only side effect of the crit­i­cism is that you will feel bad about the crit­i­cism, then you have to com­pare that bad feel­ing with the ben­e­fits you’ll get from actu­ally doing some­thing worth doing. Being remark­able is excit­ing, fun, prof­itable and great for your career. Feel­ing bad wears off.

And then, once you’ve com­pared the two, and you’ve sold your­self on tak­ing the remark­able path, answer this one:

2.    How can I cre­ate some­thing that crit­ics will criticize?

Seth Godin

One thing that came out good was that I have got­ten an actual ‘Sign-up’ from Michi­gan!  I don’t know how but it felt pretty good that I have accom­plished what I was hop­ing to hap­pen.  Now it’s time for me to go back and lis­ten to my part­ners and build a site that we all can enjoy and feel proud of.  Now I look at my site and it does look a cheap hotel wall paper.

Finally, I was able to launch my first site beetchup.com I built with sim­ple HTML & CSS with the mock up I designed in PSD.  It took me nearly 8 hrs. to build this sim­ple ‘Com­ing Soon’ page but it has all the nec­es­sary ingre­di­ents to sup­port the site in fully work­ing func­tion.  I know, it just a very sim­ple site where pro­fes­sional can whip it up in sec­onds but for my every sec­ond I spent to build this meant some­thing.  I mean I finally broke the ice and built a site from what I have learned so far using paid resources and unlim­ited amounts of free tuto­ri­als avail­able when you just search for it.  Now I am much more engaged into build­ing my knowl­edge and find­ing more resources to become a bet­ter Web Designer/Developer.

After read­ing the arti­cle ‘Build­ing an Effec­tive ‘Com­ing Soon’ Page For Your Prod­uct’ by Sacha Greif I felt a hunger to learn and find the answers to my prob­lems.  Luck­ily for me, Lynda.com lately added a new tuto­r­ial called  Typog­ra­phy for Web Design­ers by Laura Franz, what a tim­ing to find an answer to my first ques­tion Mem­o­ra­bil­ity.  I always new dif­fer­ent typog­ra­phy brought dif­fer­ent kind of emo­tions and mem­o­ries kind of like when lis­ten­ing to music but I just took all the fonts I read for granted just let­ting my heart feel them with­out giv­ing too much thought about it.  But now after watch­ing this course my whole per­cep­tion on choos­ing the right font has evolved so much I was able to cre­ate a new mock up fol­lowed by a form I think it flows really well together giv­ing a bet­ter Mem­o­rable user experience.

Since sup­ply­ing Beetchup to my partner’s restau­rant for the last two month we’ve been receiv­ing many pos­i­tive  in the com­mu­nity like Yelp and com­mer­cial blogs, so I wanted to have some­thing to show­case when some­one googles ‘Beetchup’.  I guess this would be Viral­ity.

I am hop­ing my new ‘Com­ing Soon’ page will cre­ate a Desir­abil­ity to my new prod­uct and above all this whole learn­ing expe­ri­ence is just really fun to begin with.  As for Data Col­lec­tion Abil­ity I’ve just signed up with MailChimp and I hope I made the right choice.

Finally the prod­uct pack­ag­ing design is still under work­ing progress so I’ve decided to keep it to bare min­i­mum until we have some­thing more tan­gi­ble to show on our site.  Next I need to fig­ure out how to prop­erly code this Mockup LIVE!