Masuga Design, LLC

It only took more than a year (see this post from March 11, 2007) and three very late nights in a row this last weekend, but masugadesign.com has finally been transitioned off of Wordpress onto ExpressionEngine. It actually wasn’t terribly difficult, but, true to form, I found a million little things that I wanted to update or tweak along the way. As they say, I am now “eating my own dog food”, or “sipping my own champagne.” Just glad that’s over with, so now we can get back to business. Carry on!

This is not one of those hokey April Fools’ posts that you see all over the web every April 1st: Masuga Design really is two years old today. That’s pretty much all that needs to be said, except I should note that I’m having fun making some cool stuff and things are going well. Thanks!

Being a one-man show has its drawbacks. I simply don’t have a lot of time to get to things that aren’t billable – like writing anything here that might be considered “news”. Or eating and sleeping. I do, however, have a bit of info on some upcoming things for Masuga Design. First, April 1, 2008 will be my second anniversary of “the solo gig” and what better way to celebrate that then moving to a new office. This new place is bigger, less expensive, and closer to my home. How can I lose? Second, I was at SXSW this year …More »

Thanks to Vitaly Friedman for (again) asking me to participate in a series of questions at Smashing Magazine. This time around it’s known as 50 Designers x 6 Questions. I think they’re breaking up all the info into two separate posts, so as of this writing there are three questions to look at – but those three questions pack plenty of interesting info. Go check it out. A couple other things to note about Smashing Magazine: They’re having a design book giveaway – all you have to do is answer one question in the comments to be entered. Go read …More »

I’ll be attending An Event Apart in Chicago on August 27 and 28, 2007. I look forward to seeing other Web Design folk swarming about with MacBooks and iPhones, much like I will be. I also look forward to meeting my man Dan Cederholm, who I admire greatly. I certainly hope I get to say thanks to the fascinating Jeffrey Zeldman, who kindly responded to an email I sent him circa 2001 after I read his first book, and unknowingly encouraged me just enough to keep doing what I was doing…and look where I’m at now! I just did a …More »

Thanks to A List Apart for putting together a survey on Web Design – which many people still find to be a mysterious and arcane art. Heck, I even find it to be mysterious and arcane. How in the world did I end up doing this sort of work with a background in Fine Art (oil painting) and English? I, who only ever took one photoshop class in college (I think we were running Photoshop 3.0 at the time) and who had to be one of the last University of Michigan students to get an email address – sometime in …More »

Thanks to Vitaly Friedman for asking me to participate in 35 Designers x 5 Questions over at smashingmagazine.com. There’s a lot of cool people on there that chimed in on those five questions. I learned some new things and you might, too. Check it out!

The name is now on the door! I officially started working at the new office location on April 12, 2007 (Flickr set of the move-in and setup in progress here). Business has been quite good over the last year and it was time to make things a little more formal with an actual space to go to. Consider this the one year Masuga Design Recap: Started business. Business good. Move into office space for Chapter Two, with plans to continue – only bigger and better. Thanks for your support!

I finally met the criteria to be included on the ExpressionEngine Professionals Network, and my EE Pro profile page can now be found in the Professionals section. I’m excited and proud to be a part of EE’s fine network of people. If you need to manage content on your site, I can help you with achieve that goal in a cost-effective way with the ExpressionEngine CMS. It’s a beautiful system with which I am now very familiar. We can start a site from scratch, or I can integrate your existing site into the system to give you more control over …More »

Happy 1 year anniversary to…myself. Masuga Design was officially launched on April 1, 2006 so it’s been a year and a week now and I’m still here. I have some good news – I got an office in downtown Grand Rapids, and the pictureset as it progresses is on flickr. I felt I needed a place because work has taken over my life – and it was time to put a little separation between things. Now I go to work sort of like I did in the past -which means GO to work, as in elsewhere. Out in the world. …More »