Synergy
Design + Technology + Marketing Strategy
Motto: Crazyisgood
See-ming Lee 李思明 (SML) is a designer and technologist with 25+ years of professional experience creating user experience (UX) and interactive media for Fortune 500 companies and startups. He is also the Founder of RoyaleAPI, a website that provides real-time analytics on battle data for the Supercell mobile game Clash Royale.
As the Executive Director of SML Universe, a Hong Kong-based company specializing in interactive media, See-ming leverages his diverse skill set as a cross-disciplinary synergist to assist international Fortune 500 companies with their websites, advertising campaigns, interactive installations, and prototypes.
Motivated by the belief that important ideas often lack the necessary coverage, he pursued a path as a photographer and photojournalist. He documents meaningful events and individuals, aiming to give a voice to those who are marginalized due to bigotry and prejudice. Some of his photos can be found on Getty Images.
After graduating from Yale University in 1999, See-ming moved to New York and started working as Designer (1999-2000) for IconNicholson / LBi International. He became the first cross-competency employee in the company’s history worldwide, and was promoted as Senior Designer and Senior Interface Engineer (2000-2002), and as Art Director and Senior Interface Engineer (2002-2008). With the desire to gain experience working for startups in preparation to open his own business, See-ming joined Massify as Design Director (2008) and afterwards as Chief Creative Officer (2009-2010) for Artsy. In 2012, he moved to Hong Kong and established his own consultancy firm.
See-ming’s projects have been featured in The Associated Press, BBC, Business Week, CBC, CNet, CNN, Forbes, International Herald Tribune, New York Times, Red Herring, ReadWriteWeb, Reuters, USA Today, Vanity Fair, Washington Post and Yahoo!
His projects have also been recognized in multiple international design and technology awards including the prestigious Omni Intermedia Awards, One Show Interactive awards, WWW Health Awards, WMA Web Awards and Graphis Interactive Annuals. Past clients include Bank of America, Bristol-Myers Squibb, British Airways, David's Bridal, EMI Music Publishing, IBM, IconMedialab, Prada, Regus Group, MasterCard Advisors, MasterCard International, McKinsey & Company, Morgan Stanley, WebMD, Ziff Davis Media, and Yale University.
See-ming holds a B.A. in art with a concentration in graphic design from Yale University.
Professional Affiliation: AIGA, IxDA.
If you understand the metaphors behind my logo, then you’ll know who I am.
RoyaleAPI is a website that provides analytics, profiles and insights for Clash Royale, a popular online card game. RoyaleAPI helps players to:
RoyaleAPI was founded by See-ming Lee (SML) in 2017, originally as an API service for developers, and later as a website for players. The API service was discontinued in 2020 due to high costs, and RoyaleAPI now exists purely as an end-user product. The name of the company was kept due to existing brand equity.
RoyaleAPI is a registered trademark in the US, and is wholly owned and operated by SML Universe.
Founded by See-ming Lee in 2012, SML Universe is a limited company in Hong Kong specialized in developing user experience.
Crazyisgood is the motto of SML, when the brand SML was designed (see SML Identity), and eventually also used as the logo for SML Universe — which is literally the universe of SML.
smluniverse.com was registered in 2007 to separate the professional projects by SML, where seeminglee.com, registered in Jan 2000, continued to evolve as the personal space of SML.
SML Universe became a limited company in Hong Kong in 2012.
The domain crazyisgood.com was registered in 2007 as a brand for various UGC (user-generated content) communities, but the goal for this domain has been reimagined in 2024. The domain currently redirects to seeminglee.com, but will have its own website later this year.
Although I identify as a designer, technology has been an integral part of my creative process for many years. I began programming at a young age, and my professional design work often lies at the intersection of art and technology.
Regarding the construction of this website, I frequently use personal projects as an opportunity to explore new technical frameworks that pique my interest. This site was built from scratch using Nuxt 3, a web framework based on Vue 3. The content management system driving the site is Nuxt Content, an official module developed by the Nuxt team. This module enables me to write content in Markdown and publish it quickly.
For the CSS framework, I rely on Tailwind CSS. Tailwind is a utility-first CSS framework that empowers me to efficiently design new features and functionalities directly within the code. The site’s icons are provided by Font Awesome Pro, an excellent icon library offering a wide range of up-to-date icons. Additionally, Font Awesome's SVG icon feature allows for efficient bundling to reduce file sizes.
The images are hosted on Amazon S3 and optimized to various sizes using Cloudflare Image Optimization. Cloudflare’s content delivery network (CDN) caches the images, ensuring fast loading times for visitors. By utilizing direct repository integration with Github, the site is automatically built and deployed on Cloudflare Pages whenever I push a new commit to the master branch. Leveraging Cloudflare, with its extensive global network of data centers, ensures rapid loading speeds for visitors worldwide, regardless of their proximity to an origin server.