I photoshopped the very first icon for MicroCreditor today. I brainstormed it since yesterday. I first thought of drawing three persons posing together to create a letter 'm'. They show the unity of two debtors and a loan shark a loan creditor in the middle. You can see them above. Yeah that'd be the icon. But without me telling you, I don't think you'd know that the three persons look like a 'm' which would stand for MicroCreditor. I scraped the idea since it looks quite lame and classic. I opted for a modern look with letter 'm' embossed in a glass orb. It looks so nice for me. As much as I love it, I have something to confess: I cloned the design from another icon by an unknown designer. The orb, the light and the shadow are his pure creativities, or he might have learnt those bits by bits from the others. I just happened to have the skills to learn and replicate his design. This is good enough for a photoshop rookie like me.

It was 8 years ago, in year 2000, when I got my first computer. It was a dream came true. Before that I had been watching my neighbor typing his word documents, staring at his shiny computer screen, thinking of what kind of machine it was. I don't know what country you live but here in Cambodia, having a personal computer back in year 2000 was a pride. So... I liked it so much that I was stuck in front of it for hours everyday. My private tutor taught me Word, Excel and Windows 95. It wasn't long until I learnt something useful myself. Dad bought some phone equipments from Hong Kong, and so for a while I played with it *cough* unlocking, flashing and bricking phones *cough*. In 2001 and early 2002, nobody was sending a SMS picture message, since 60% of mobile phones didn't support it. It was totally new when I designed several picture messages in Khmer, my local language. The first one "Eternal Love" ស្នេហ៍អមតៈ was a hit among Cambodian phone users. Apparently, almost every darn phone in Cambodia received it, as people quickly learned to forward to their friends and families, although many old models would see "Message cannot display here" instead of the picture. The funny thing was that I received the picture several times from my friends. Hell no! They didn't believe I was the creator. I guess I played a big role in jumping start the Picture SMS technology here. Subsequently, I created more picture messages in Khmer including "I Love You" and custom-made "My Love" sealed with "Chakrya" my then girlfriend's name, and I guess it played a role to win her heart. You can see those pictures above.

Past is past. Today, years after my first legendary picture SMS, I created a set of three pictures about the upcoming solar eclipse on Friday, August 01 2008 which is visible totally in China and partially across Asia. Will this be my new legacy in which people are mass forwarding my pics? Let's see.

After having learned some helpful photoshop tutorials, while doing some practices in August 2005, I designed this cool gadget-like interface for the prototype of my forex signal software. My first take on UI design was suprisingly stunning, wasn't it?

I designed TabOne in November 2007 for one of my future website, TheCurrencyTrading.com. It took me about two weeks to complete the design and another week to slice it up to code as an ASP.NET skin. TabOne incorporates one main usability feature: Tab Navigation which was used extensively by Amazon.com before they had grown too big in 2007. You can see the search box is similar to that of Amazon. That's simply because I was truly inspired by the design of Amazon. The colors I picked were mainly for male visitors. I tried adding as much as blue to look masculin but at the same time open to red-yellow experiment.