Hello World. My name is Leon Brown and I am the User Experience and Expression product lead for Asia Pacific region. I am a transplant to Singapore, only having arrived here in August this year. Singapore is great. I live in an area called Novena with my wife and daughter and cat. Singapore is a wonderful place to live and we are enjoying it. I love to eat out at small shops and this is food heaven.

So what is my job? My role is to help build awareness of how Microsoft's is making development of excellent user experiences a priority. We have a great team that is very focused on making sure designers and developers can collaborate together to create state-of-the-art interfaces for web sites, rich client applications, and applications that run on Windows. The teams are focused on making sure that designers can play an active part not only in web and interactive development as today, but also in bringing compelling applications to any surface. Very exciting time to work here at Microsoft and I work in with a great set of people both here in Singapore and around SE Asia, China, and India.

My last job was at Adobe Systems, Inc. in San Jose, California. For the past eight years I was Senior Product Manager on the Illustrator product line as well as the Creative Suite. Prior to Adobe I worked in Japan for eight years as an audio engineer (Pro Tools) in the studio and mixing for concerts, designing clubs and more. A great time was had and love to talk about it.

I often get asked why I came to Microsoft when for years it was the nasty evil empire. Lots of reasons, but really a great time to be here. The team who is building Expression first convinced me with the drive and sincerity around building the best tools and technologies to create compelling experiences. Now that's fun. Add to it the excitement of working with 15 regional subsidiaries in Asia to spread the word and build the business and you have a dream job.

I plan on using this blog to talk about people I meet and what they are doing here in Asia, both around our products and technology, and just design and experience in general. I will also act as a repeater for information I think is useful as it comes across my desk. I hope this useful to those who read. Please post comments or drop me a note. I travel around the regions quite extensively (last week in China, next in New Zealand, a few days in Korea) so if you are a designer or developer or just anyone interested in talking and learning more, let me know. Maybe we can meet up.