Starting with a love for the underwater world, Erwin Kodiat began delving into underwater photography. Among the many beautiful and captivating photo subjects underwater, nudibranchs held a particular allure for Erwin, especially due to their very beautiful and cryptic colors and patterns.
It turned out that many of his photographer and diver friends shared the same passion. Many of them had difficulty identifying the Latin names of the creatures they photographed underwater. Why latin names? Because there are so many types of nudibranchs, and few laypeople know about these creatures or encounter them in daily life, so they rarely have common names in everyday language.
With his background as a programmer, Erwin decided to create a website that could help nudibranch enthusiasts share knowledge or obtain information about nudibranchs based on the photos they had. The website was launched in 2007 and named Nudi Pixel.
In a relatively short time, this website became one of the popular websites among divers. Not only from Indonesia but also from various parts of the world. When it was about four years old, Nudi Pixel had more than 40,000 photo contributions from over 1,000 photographers from various parts of the world. In addition, many book authors on nudibranchs at that time, such as Neville Coleman, Helmut Debelius, Terry Gosliner, and Dave Behrens, sourced photos for their books from those available on Nudi Pixel.
Unfortunately, Erwin was handling development and maintenance alone at the time. There was talk of transforming Nudi Pixel into a community-based platform, rather than being maintained by just one person. However, adding this function required considerable effort, and due to Erwin's busy work and family schedule, Nudi Pixel eventually became neglected and ultimately went offline.
In 2022, an old friend who was a senior programmer named Budi Sentosa became interested in helping revive Nudi Pixel. After lengthy discussions and with the help of another friend, a senior graphic designer Dicky Juwono, the Nudi Pixel project began in 2023. The project took quite a while amidst everyone's busy schedules, but finally, in August 2024, with a different approach as a community-based platform, Nudi Pixel was relaunched.