By the way, update the About page.
About the Author#
I am a designer. If you can open this page, you must have seen my portfolio. I am an INFJ introverted male, who enjoys reading, writing, raising fish, drawing, and various electronic products.
Currently, my work mainly involves two aspects:
- Business operations for my own company.
- Personal projects.
For the business part, it's all about getting paid and getting things done, purely for the sake of making a living. Most of the things I do in this area won't be included in my portfolio. Although they are created by me, they involve clients and colleagues, and I generally don't consider them as my own designs. Besides, they are not artworks, but products. The few projects that I do include in my portfolio are the ones that I feel relatively good about and worth putting more effort into. Some of these projects are related to areas that I am interested in, some align with the aesthetic taste of the clients, and some provide a certain level of challenge to my abilities, which catches my attention.
To be honest, since 2019, I have hardly worried about not having clients coming to me for business. Maybe because of this, I relaxed a bit during that period and always had a procrastinating attitude towards work. Another important reason is that commercial design products are essentially the result of negotiation, and negotiation is ultimately an art of compromise. I still have a long way to go in mastering this art.
But fortunately, I didn't waste this period of relaxation.
In my work, I deal with computers all day long. First of all, I am very interested in computers themselves and often secretly feel happy that I can live in this great era with computers. Naturally, I immerse myself in various interesting things related to computers.
It's like skating on an endless dark ice lake without wearing ice skates. From setting up a personal server, DIY NAS, to building my first truly personal website, I slowly experience the simplicity and elegance of controlling a computer using only keyboard commands and shortcuts (because as a designer, I have always used a mouse and a drawing tablet, and I feel that using them is a bit clumsy). There is an indescribable pleasure in this process. This brings me to the second aspect, personal projects.
About this Site#
This site is one of my personal projects. I have been thinking about it for a long time and have always wanted to have my own container on the internet.
The content in this container is my publicly accessible spiritual world.
The main means of creating this spiritual world is CG art. The entire creative process is also a spiritual experiment, so let's call it the "CG Art Lab".
Tools are Extensions of Human Limbs#
There is a saying that "tools are extensions of human limbs". For example, a fan is an extension of the hand, a wheel is an extension of the legs, and a telephone is an extension of the mouth and ears. By extension, it seems that a computer is an extension of the human brain. I have also written an article called "How to Build a Second Brain", in which I roughly explained how I view digital note-taking as a tool. In fact, from a broad perspective, whether it's design, writing, or coding, it's all about how to use the computer as a tool to create better, to understand better, to become familiar with it, and to polish it so that it becomes more obedient and capable.
Computers are designed by the smartest people on this planet, and it is difficult for ordinary people like me to truly adapt the computer to ourselves. We often don't know where to start. In response to this, I have a set of underlying logic: find the exact problem, improve my own abilities to match the tools I want to use.
Finding the exact problem is easy, but finding the exact problem is relatively difficult. Since it took a lot of time and effort to find them, recording these problems, including the process of solving them, is valuable in itself.
Writing is Thinking Itself#
In the past, for every problem I encountered, whether it was searching for a shortcut or building a Hackintosh, I never thought about documenting these processes. First, I thought it was troublesome, and second, I thought that technology updates so quickly that these methods might become outdated in a short period of time. Now it seems that I was completely wrong.
Although these techniques and methods are all "skills," this kind of thinking does not conform to the "way."
I have decided to honestly record these processes. After all, they belong to my own creations, skills, experiences, and thoughts. The journey is always taken slowly by oneself, and publishing them publicly is more about letting these contents pass my own scrutiny.
Let's talk about whether you like it or not.