About the Author
Morten Rand-Hendriksen is a Norwegian in what he calls “self-imposed exile” in Vancouver, B.C., Canada. He has worn more hats than most but over time he has found a great love and passion for design in general and web design in particular.
Like many designers, Morten started his design career working with the Macromedia Dreamweaver platform. But as his focus shifted from generic static-page designs to more advanced database driven dynamic sites the platform became quite cumbersome to work with and he ended up writing more and more of his code in the Open Source notepad-on-steroids Notepad ++. For this reason the timing couldn’t have been better when Microsoft invited him to test their new design suite called Expression in the summer of 2007. At the time Morten’s company Pink & Yellow Media had just taken on a new project for a local game company and he decided that he would use the Expression tools exclusively to design their new web site. The result was iZufall.com – a simple static page site with advanced CSS features.
It didn’t take long before Morten realized the potential built into Expression Web when it came to CSS design and through that, blog theme development. Only months after adopting the platform as the company’s main design and development tool he shifted the focus of his company from general design to focus heavily on CSS and blog theme development.
The truly interesting thing about this was Morten’s work in documenting his experience with the Expression tools online got him noticed by the Expression product team in Redmond who have asked him to write a book on Expression Web as a result.
Morten’s work with Expression and his much read Pink & Yellow Media Blog quickly got the attention of Microsoft and the Expression Development Team and in the fall of 2007 and spring of 2008 the two started to build a symbiotic relationship; Morten tested, twisted, praised and complained about the applications and in turn the Microsoft staff responded to his input and offered help to solve problems.
Morten continues his work with the Expression Suite and in particular Expression Web to this day and focuses heavily on theme development for the WordPress blogging platform. One example of his work is this very site which is built on WordPress and designed and develloped entirely using Expression Web 2 and Expression Design 2. He blogs on his experiences with Expression and design in general at the Pink & Yellow Media Blog and also participates sporadically in the Expression Community.
In addition to designer and information philosopher, Morten’s Curriculum Vitae also lists him as a photographer, musician, composer, artist, jeweller, politician and debater. He enjoys ambient and extreme music, politics, analytical philosophy and science fiction.
