It was almost 10 years ago when I first became really interested in audio technologies and started playing around with music equipments such as synthesizers and software sequencers. Although it was never meant to be serious, there was a point that I felt comfortable enough to include these music clips in my works, and by coincidence, a few of them were later included in a commercial video project for a trade show, which is a rewarding experience form an amateur’s perspective.

The recording setup was long gone. I accidentally found these clips while cleaning up my hard drive the other day, made some edit and put them up as a reminder of how much fun I had with the now-outdated sound module Roland JV-1010.

FOR-A is a Japanese manufacturer that specializes in professional broadcast and video equipments. The first US website (above image) was a collaboration between myself and FOR-A’s New York branch in 2003. Designed and developed single-handedly, this 3-months project is a good representation of the quality standard of my earlier works as a graphic designer and a web developer.

Note: The US website was later replaced by a new global template in 2005.
Link: FOR-A.com

Building a personal site in the blog format has many obvious advantages. It’s fast to build, easy to manage, flexible and expandible. If you are using open source content management systems (CMS) such as Wordpress (Blog) or PhpBB (Forum), there are big communities out there that generate enormous amount of resources that allow site owners to choose specific feature sets and implement them quick.

The build-from-scratch approach simply seems a lot less attractive now. If I have enough control over customization, there is almost no reason not to go with this time-saving route, even it means I have to live with a fixed content / presentation structure.

There was a time I thought building a Flash wrapper is more interesting than the actual content. This site could have looked like this: