neuro-designs

Continuing our quest to have a reliable electricity source because of the scheduled power outages, we finally got the generator installed today.

Since our office is a relatively small office, this simple Honda-powered generator is more than sufficient to power the whole facility during power outages. It also has a built-in power regulator, although it’s somewhat rather noisy.

The installation is not perfect, though. We still have some things to consider to permanently locate this generator. But as the time goes, at least should the power is out, we can still do our daily work for at least 8 hours a day with air conditioning.

Frankly speaking, I am quite pissed for these two days for the fact that there are still many (and I mean many) printing companies in our country that is not PDF-compatible. The story goes like this. One of our clients are going to print seven different kinds of letterheads, one for each branch that they have. The logical solution for this is obviously sending out print-ready PDF files of those letterheads, to whichever vendors they use, this will avoid the chances of film output mistakes. So I told them to have the vendor call me for a pre-press brief. And oh yes, they do tell me that they can accept PDFs, which turns out they don’t, and they can only accept FreeHand or CorelDraw files for film outputs. Yes, they do accept PDFs, and then converts them into either FreeHand or CorelDraw, and then go on with the film output. But they have no means of a direct CTF process from PDFs whatsoever. They even asked me for the missing typefaces. Since when does a print-ready PDF asks for a missing typeface file?

This is just unacceptable. All these years, all of the printing and film output companies that we’ve worked with have been accepting PDFs without any problems. What year is this? I feel like I’m back to 1995 all of a sudden. Come on, if you can’t accept PDFs as a standard file format for your printing company, chances are, you better close down.

After more than a year, I finally got the chance to convert the video of my interview in Metro TV’s Indonesia Now and posted it in YouTube. This goes back in January 2007 when we don’t even have a dedicated furniture in our office :D.

10 days ago, we decided that we should do an upgrade to our office hardware. And since Disti (a friend of ours) is also coming to be our newest graphic designer, we obviously need a new workstation.

So here it is, my G5 iMac goes to the next workstation, and the new Intel iMac replaces mine. Bottom line, it serves well indeed! Mind the gloss, though.

As environmentally-concerned designers, one of our real-life efforts to help save the planet is to power-down our electricity usage in the office, be it air conditioners, printers, fluorescent lights, you name it. We tried our best to turn them off when they’re not in use. Over the year, one of our most notable power hungry equipment was the CRT monitor for the office Windows PC, which with our constant website projects and with everyone running non-Intel Macs or Windows with IE 7.0, its presence is required for IE 6.0 testings (Yes, that is probably what it does most if not printing ID cards for our clients).

While the PC itself doesn’t do much to our individual workflows, we decided to give our office’s corner occupant an upgrade from its rather old and distorted CRT monitor. Our selection goes to the Samsung Syncmaster 740N. It’s a fairly decent LCD panel with a fair price as well. And since we don’t need the DVI connection, the analog port is nothing for us to be worried of. The specifications itself is not top-notch, but it’s a good bargain with that kind of price. And Samsung is known as a reliable LCD manufacturer as well.

With the new monitor, we hope that it’ll give us all aesthetic, energy and health benefits that could lead us to better productivity, because LCD monitors are slimmer and nicer to look at, and not to mention has no graphical distortions, uses way less power (which means a positive point for our electricity bill), and easier to the eyes with its much less radiation than the CRT.

This is our secondary entrance to the office. A bit bumped and dented steel door, but that doesn’t stop us from being creative