By mei, on January 7th, 2008
Honoring our parents.. personally, I think there is so much more that can be done in this area. For a start, acknowledging how little our parents’ generation had and how much they gave for our generation puts much in perspective. This compared to how much I concerned myself with MY life’s direction, MY career, MY family planning and MY everything. Not that planning for oneself is such a bad thing, but compared to how little my parents thought for themselves and how much I think for myself, mine seem excessive.
Here are a list of possible ways to honor our parents, gathered from friends.
1. Spend more communication and prayer time
2. Be practical and up the monthly household contribution for them, even if you are not living with them
3. Pay a visit, plan a family trip
4. Pamper your parents with a holiday
5. For those of us with pre-believing parents, pray daily for their salvation!
By mei, on November 21st, 2007
Thought of drawing a pie chart with percentage of emotions felt, hopefully the next time this is drawn, it will be all red!
Bible verse: 1 Corinthians 13:13
And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.
Adobe Illustrator‘s tools:
Pie chart, Effect- Stylize- Drop Shadow for the legend, Clipping mask
By mei, on November 8th, 2007
Today, I came across this site 
which advocates that graphic designer should not do work for clients who ask ”show me your 3 designs and if they are good, we will pay you.”
I have also done such work (thankfully not that many) for such clients and also for bloggers online and totally understand the angst and the discouragement. What made me more upset is that there are many designers out there who don’t ask about the customers’ identity/ mission/ image/ customers/ products before starting their work. This I believe will foster an impression for companies/clients that asking for design specs only require clicking some button or making minor changes to online free logos at the other end.
This is almost like walking into a restaurant and expecting to pay only if the food taste good and no, even the cheapest, most run down restaurant don’t give you money-back. So neither should fresh designer, no matter how bad you think your skills are, do work for free. At most, no repeat customer, but hey, no free lunch.
See a great article on this by British Design Innovation.
By mei, on November 3rd, 2007
Love seems to be a recurring theme these days..
1. During bible study, God’s commandment for us to love Him and our neighbor was mentioned.. and
2. In defining a mission for my life, loving God (i.e. drawing close to Him and it takes effort I believe as it’s a little tricky to be in dialogue with someone not physical, something I am still grappling with) and loving people.. loving people I don’t know and taking the effort to share with friends on the web.. and
3. In reading a graphic design book, realised that designers also have love on their mind.
A quick check in online bible resource sites, found that love is mentioned 400+ times to 500 in different bible versions. Interesting.. just thinking how this love can be shown in this blog.. any ideas?
By mei, on October 5th, 2007
It’s a gift for my birthday and now I’m on my way to being a cartoonist!
A great tool, though I’m still learning how to optimise the use of it as after using the pencil tool and draw using the Wacom, I still have to rework the anchor points. But well, it’s faster compared to drawing from scratch!
By mei, on October 3rd, 2007
Starting a Business is difficult.
Recently, I met a very fun loving Italian lady in one of Expat Professional Women Society’s function and she was telling me how she started her interior design company in Shanghai with her Swiss husband.
In China, it is really difficult to retain staff as job hopping is very common and even harder to motivate staff. It is always amusing to hear of stories that seem out of the world happening at work place and a blessing to know someone who has it under control.
I did a web search of how designers or cartoonists become full-time in their passion, and here’re the links to their blog posts:
Veerle’s blog – What I learnt from starting my own business
Chewing Pencils – What do you do
Most Talked About Clues (blog posts)