Masuga Design, LLC

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!

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 »

I’ve received quite a few emails from people in response to my search for part-time help. I haven’t really decided on anyone yet – or even answered most of the emails as I’ve been real busy working some things out lately that have to do with the growth of Masuga Design (and the details of which will be written about here, I can assure you). All the emails are flagged and marked as “to respond”, and I’ve (seriously) been trying to find the time to respond to some of them. Some, I say, because I need to clarify what I’m …More »

Thanks to everyone for all their patience with me from November 2006 until now. I’ve never been this bombarded with things to get done – I’ve been at my wit’s end for weeks and I’m trying to work as quickly (with no loss of quality, of course…) as I can. I’m trying to accommodate everyone and admittedly, failing miserably in some instances. I have a ridiculous number of projects to ideally get done this month – and I’m sick as a dog. Weak. Feverish. Run down. Shivery. Makes getting up and working a lot of “not fun”. But I press …More »

Masuga Design is growing…um…FAST. Too fast. I need help (part-time, that is) and I need it yesterday. Are you a student looking for some real-world experience? Then please read my spiel: I’m a (really small) web design studio that develops useful and engaging websites for small to mid-sized businesses and individuals from one coast to another including various businesses right here in Grand Rapids. I design and develop websites that are lean, easily maintainable, user friendly, search-engine optimized, and adhere as close as possible to web standards. I am currently a one-person operation located in Grand Rapids, MI and have …More »

I’m not currently taking any new work. You can still drop me an email to discuss a project, but I’m pretty well booked through March/April and simply cannot take on any new projects outside of projects I have going on or for which I have provided a proposal. Thank you!

Before going solo, I worked for a web design company in Grand Rapids that puts out a (primarily interactive) promotional piece every year. The piece I worked on while I was there was an interactive game (sort of like Myst) that incorporated numerous areas and hundreds of images from downtown Grand Rapids. All the hours spent in Photoshop on this project paid off. It won a Gold ADDY award and was a Judge’s Choice pick, but best of all it was featured in a book titled “Innovative Promotions That Work“ published by Rockport Publishers in April of 2006. And there’s …More »

You might think I’m crazy, as a relatively new freelancer, to be turning down work, but I’m REALLY not into poker. I don’t mind playing the occasional friendly poker game, but spending my working hours steeped in lousy gif animations, affiliate codes, and terminology that means as much to me as an ancient text written in Aramaic (which is to say nothing) is just not my idea of fun. Poker sites just don’t turn my crank. I don’t want to do poker sites, so I’m passing on offers and requests to work on them. Even if I did do some …More »

As a new sole-proprietor, I had to get up to speed on exactly how to pay my taxes, and I found that I need to start paying estimated quarterly taxes, which I’ve never had to do up until now. I’m not at a point where I can afford an accountant so I was looking for some sort of easy (yeah, right!) solution on how to do this, and I actually found one. I’ve been using WebTurboTax to pay my taxes for years, and leave it to them to come up with a service geared for the estimated taxes crowd: estimatedtaxes.com. …More »