neuro-designs

Back in January, we helped Pixily, one of our clients, establishing their identity, printed materials, and website prototype. This week, we’re as proud as they are, since Pixily has been selected as a finalist in this year’s Amazon Web Services Start-Up Challenge. Congratulations, guys! It is indeed a well-deserved recognition.

We just love well-designed books. A few days back, we just got our pre-ordered ABC3D pop-up book shipment from Amazon arrived at our door step. As simple as this book may be (After all, it’s just about the alphabet from A to Z), it is intricately engineered as a very sophisticated pop-up book. Here are some more shots on the book, and a few of its pages:

It’s sad really, that other than our friend Andrew Shu’s wedding invitation, we never see any local pop-up books that are engineered as good as this one. So, come to think of it, this is money well spent.

Here’s a promotional video of the book:

You can find more information about the book at its website.

I was just browsing around today when I stumbled upon Design Police. These are brilliant. The next time a client with a REALLY bad taste in design comes barging in and tell us that they have a superb sense of design, maybe we’ll use this to tame them down :D.

But before that, we’ll just show them this…

The long awaited pre-ordered DVD finally arrived on our door step today, and personally I was excited to dedicate a couple hours to watch the movie after the working hours in the office. And since it’s been a while since I watched a good-quality documentary movie, apart from Discovery or NGC, of course, watching this movie has given me a broader perspective on something that I learned already. The film’s quality is truly second to none.

Graduating from UPH, one of the universities in Indonesia with a notable visual communication design major, I took typography very seriously. So serious that it has become one of my most favorite subjects on my second year onward. I believe that good typography is one of the key to output good and outstanding designs. To be honest, that’s what our designers lack of.

Watching the scenes in the movie, and the interviews with some of the world’s most notable designers and how they think about or treat typography, we can see that Indonesian designers still have limited capacities and knowledge on how to produce good typography in design, regularly. I can still see huge billboards or concert posters spread in Jakarta that just doesn’t kern well.

Even without doubt that Helvetica can be named as the world’s most popular typeface, with this movie, I learned that we can still appreciate a typeface even more than just as a personal favorite.

So any designers out there that are still having doubts on whether to see this documentary or not, I’d say go get it. It’s worth the watch. And I still have to schedule myself to watch the extra features…

More info available on the film’s official site.