Beginning of my designing era

Few days back, while I was trying to recover one of Yahoo accounts for some important document, I came across my initial set of web templates that I designed 8 years back! It was year 2000 after summer vacations when my buddy, ra[y]za, explained me what exactly a web template is, and I felt a little interested too. He showed me one of his submissions that were live on FreeWebTemplates.com and couple of people downloaded/reviewed it too. I was into basic websites since 1999, thanks to ra[y]za again! But the idea of template clicked me as well and I designed 2 web templates.

I submitted the layouts on freewebtemplates.com and was waiting for my templates to appear in their showcase. Few weeks passed, I even re-submitted but no luck! After I had lost all hopes, the templates were just like any other spare file on my hard drive because I had designed them for community and not for any client/website. It was after 2-3 months when my friend told me “hey! your templates are online and they’ve reached 10 most downloaded templates” – I was way too happy to see the output. Not sure about the actual figure but I guess it scored 2500+ in 2-3 weeks.

When I came across my designs recently, it actually reminded me of my old layouts. But nevertheless – I really worked hard to improve my designing skills and MashAllah the result has been quite promising. I have taught Photoshop to more than 10 people, have even conducted workshops. Seeing hopeless faces in designing – I always used to tell people ‘it takes some time to move higher..‘ and same happened with me (:

Let me share my 2 layouts that marked the beginning of my precious skill!

For recent work, freel to visit my online portfolio: http://axdimensions.deviantart.com/gallery/

Will 'Sheesha.pk' hammer the rest?

‘Public Timeline – Sheesha.pk‘ was launched today by Fahim Ilyas and his team. Twitter did start the trend of micro blogging and here we have is a localized version; Sheesha – Pakistan’s first social micro blogging service.

Sheesha is a social micro blogging service which allows you to post frequent updates about yourself. Share it with friends, family and colleagues. Join groups; send out messages to different groups of your interest. And you can also export your data in RSS/ATOM format. Sheesha team has also planned to integrate social giants like Orkut and Facebook in future.

‘A social micro blogging startup could be the next thing for Pakistani users with the growth of Twitter usage‘ said Fahim. However, I believe Twitter account integration is must in the initial feature set. And the team has promised as the very next feature.

Micro blogging is on hype these days. But I believe the venture might have a tough time in the start gaining some market. Many people today use Twitter not only for “What are you doing?” but for many other things more than that. Sheesha beta release needs a little bit UI improvement and so does the ‘send message’ feature. During the last few weeks, I have been seeing a lot of startups based on Twitter that have been using Twitter API. And on the other hand, I read many negative reviews about Twitter on high profile blogs like ZDNet. I am not sure if Sheesha would click Pakistani users but may be – we can help make our Pakistani startups become a better service for us. Hmm, I think I came across couple of Twitter based services that also supports grouping feature. And battling against all such services would be a little difficult. Unique feature set can definitely give Sheesha a great edge!

Will Sheesha really hammer the rest? Drop in your 2 cents for Sheesha if you have some clicky thoughts in your mind. Positive feedback can really matter a lot. Good luck Fahim and team for Sheesha!

Update (9:15 AM 2/5/2009):
Sheesha.pk has been developed using an open source micro blogging service ‘Laconica‘ developed by Control Yourself, Inc. Another live example can be seen at: http://identi.ca/