Masuga Design, LLC

Masuga Design recently completed ExpressionEngine development for a Travel Channel property called “World Hum”.

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!

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!

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 »

I’m a plumber with leaky faucets. I’m not eating my own dogfood. You might have noticed that both this site and masuga.com are buit on WordPress, even though I’ve more or less abandoned using it. In the coming months, I’ll be rebuilding masugadesign.com on a new CMS, as well as updating my portfolio. What? You thought I haven’t been working all these months? Not the case! I’ll have a number of things to add to my portfolio when I get around to fixing the issues I’m having under the hood.

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 »