3/10/2009
Chinese art for western designers---Wei’s Way
My name is Wei. I am the webmaster of www.chineseinkdesign.com, and the the president of a new company, Chinese Ink Online, LLC.
www.chineseinkdesign.com is a web-site to help English-reading people/designers to find the Chinese calligraphy in accurate translation.
My ex-girlfriend was a designer who told me that her US colleagues and classmates in design field always have problem in finding good Chinese Calligraphy images, no mention it is impossible for them to tell what these calligraphy means. Her word brought the genesis of Chinese Ink Online, LLC.
On June 2006, I left my ex-job as an IT assistant with savings of about $20,000 to begin this adventure-- Since then, I travel back and forth US, China, and Taiwan recruiting people, raising fund, setting up office, doing sales. For having very limited resource in the beginning, I even dealt with accounting, tax, company registration without the help of lawyer and accountant. There was one month that I had to sleep on the floor on my trip. The worst thing of my life happened on 16th December, 2006—my ex-girl returned the ring and left me, which made me literally “shut-down” for a month. Maybe good things are supposed to happen after bad things. Two months later, I obtained maybe the most comprehensive and highest quality database of Hanzi calligraphy/Chinese art images from our first parent company. Our parent company, WingNet, spent 7 years doing a national museum project sponsored by Taiwanese government to digitalize ancient Chinese arts. It gives us a database of 340,000 calligraphy images and thousands of high quality art images from all the famous Chinese ancient artists.
After getting the image database, I spent half year doing translation. We also created two online search engines to match those Calligraphy images to our 80,000 translations, and one search engine to categorize our ancient Chinese art/painting images. We did all the translation/revision carefully, so that we can provide the guarantee on accuracy.
The web-design and programming job was another story for me. Since I do not really have experience in those fields beforehand, the try-errors were really painful. We re-write www.chineseinkdesign.com three times with three different programming languages (ASP, PHP, .Net 2.0). As an inexperienced nobody, this journey was really turbulent for me.
Now everything is getting smoother. Our second parent company, Systemlead, kicked in on May 2007, which made our IT background strong. Our designer, Yung, is working so hard and becoming experienced. Since my first target market was tattoo design industry, I traveled almost all around the US cities visiting tattoo shops. I have been all the southern and eastern states of US, plus Illinois , Nevada , and Ohio . My trip was not really successful in terms of bringing in profit. But the good thing is that we got a lot people saying they like our idea and service. Those friend’s suggestions make our website better. And I believe profit will finally come if we do bring value to this world. My mission for Chinese Ink Online, LLC is to be the New Silk Road across the ocean to re-introduce the beauty of Chinese culture to western world. Everyone shares the same value is our friend.
A brief about me~~
I am a straightforward guy. I came from Taiwan in 2003 to study in FSU. After graduation in 2005, I began to work as an IT assistant in NC. When the chance/ resource came to me in the middle of 2006, I left my job and began to establish Chinese Ink Online, LLC.