We attempted to make our first creative video in 2011 after our trip to Tokyo.
The city was so vibrant! There was a palpable sense of something special in the air. Even the quiet little backstreets had character. We found the mix of modern technology, hip trends, traditions, and natural beauties just … right.
After our first day, the energy of the city just rubbed off on us. Something deep in our souls awakened. Imaginary music started playing, like a soundtrack to our walking, shopping, eating, and being in the city. We knew we had to capture it all, and started filming little things, nearly everything, that enthralled us. The rest came unbelievably easily and naturally. We went on ccmixter.org to find a song that matched our imaginary soundtrack the closest. The editing of the video then took fewer than 24 hours. And we got it.
Here it is. Hope you can feel some of the energy that we felt. :)
AOOG stands for Art Out Of Garbage. The brand’s mission is to create innovative products from normally discarded natural materials.
The logo is inspired by the brand’s clean, clever, and sleek designs. The simple geometries are also rooted in the bits and pieces of the natural ”garbage” materials used for making the products, being put together to create greater meanings.
In 2000, we also developed a web site for the Rhode Island Psychological Association.
This site was HUGE. There were nearly 100 pages of content. To keep the site organized and easy to navigate, we used a dynamic menu bar that allowed visitors to see all subcategories of the content quickly. The dynamic menu bar also enabled the visitors to access nearly all content within 2 clicks.
We chose clean color scheme and layouts and used commercial stock photos, in order to achieve a friendly and professional look for the pages.
These graphics were our entries to a cover contest for The Critical Review magazine at Brown University in 2000.
The Critical Review was a biannual, student-organized magazine that published reviews of most classes at Brown before every new semester. All the reviews were written at the end of the previous semester by students who were taking the classes. Very useful and often hilarious, these reviews told you everything you needed to know, even stuff that some professors probably didn’t want you to hear. They were tips (and warnings!) from your fellow students. They made exploring new, totally random classes outside your majors even more fun.
We wanted our covers to reflect the culture of the magazine. On the front cover, an eye represented the experience of those who had “seen” the classes. Names of many different classes flooded over the page, hinting of the many thousands of reviews being offered inside. On the back cover, a less experienced eye awaited at the other end, eager to explore. The reviews on the pages of the magazine sat between the two covers; stories were passed along from the experienced to the newcomers.
Unfortunately, the editors went with a different design. (Boo). We had fun making ours anyway.
We also designed this web site for the Computational Modeling Consultants, Inc. in 2001.
We wanted the web design to compliment the logo that we had designed for the company earlier. The cool blue color of the background was selected to compliment the orange of the logo. If you look closely at the home page, you will see that the logo followed the rhythm set by the other elements. The squares, which were links to different sections of the web site, were echoed by the rectangular form of the logo. The font of the section titles next to the squares was also reiterated by the company’s name that in turn reached out to the logo, which, ultimately, served as a full stop to the rhythm.
The background graphic was made from a picture of one of the company’s ball-and-stick molecular models. And to suggest to the viewers that the links were live, highlights and motion blurs were used as rollover effects.
The other pages of the site were simple, yielding the spotlight to the content of each page, while still remaining visually coherent.
We designed this corporate logo for the Computational Modeling Consultants, Inc. in 2001. The company was a startup that emerged out of materials research at MIT.
We initially came up with a few different concepts. The client liked this minimalist one the most. Good taste! We made several tweaks and were finally satisfied with this design.
We wanted the logo to be simple with regard to colors — we used only one! We demanded a lot of the form, though. It had to be minimal yet intriguing. We relied on only simple shapes and lines, but used both positive and negative spaces simultaneously — see, for example, “CMC” — to convey the meanings.
We did these graphics for the artist and author Anne Morgan Spalter circa 2001. She wanted some graphics for the background of her slides in a presentation she was giving on colors.
We came up with these worlds of colors. We started by outlining a globe with latitude and longitude lines. The rest was done by freehand paining with our trusted pal Adobe Photoshop.
We designed this web site for the artist and author Anne Morgan Spalter in the summer of 2000. We had done a web site for her book The Computer in the Visual Arts earlier that year.
This was when we first adopted the style of minimal graphics, and it would continue to be our style of choice for years to come. “Minimal” here doesn’t mean a minimum amount of content or design. It’s about the use of simple forms and colors to get the message across, in a meaningful way. The colors, fonts, graphics, and even the white spaces are part of the vocabulary. Yup, we spent tons of time on the white spaces, moving things around. Pixel. By. Pixel. They set the rhythm of the pages.
For the homepage graphic, we used one of Anne’s works of art. We imagined that the piece was intended to be folded. And that’s what we did. We sat down with our good friend Photoshop and started to “fold” it. Your imagination can do the rest.
It’s been 12 years, but we think the design still looks fresh. (What a stark contrast to how our other web site from the same year has aged!) Or is it just our taste? :)
This was another fun project. We designed posters to promote cooking lessons organized by the Thai Students Associationat Brown University in 2001.
We wanted the posters to convey that there would be a great deal of fun and delicious food. Also, since our posters would be pinned on boards all over campus alongside gazillions of other posters, we used vivid, eye-catching colors to make ours stand out.
The turnout was greater than anticipated. The participants seemed to really enjoy themselves. And we TSA members had a blast!
Here, as a bonus, are also some photos from the event.
This is as old as it gets! This web site for the new Computer Engineering program at Brown University was created by Joe Thapana Phanich and yours truly. Way back in 1999! Yup, the 999th year of the 2nd millennium. Do you remember the web sites you frequented back then?
We used Netscape Composer to create the web pages and designed the graphics with a god-knows-what version of Photoshop. The pages and graphics might — okay, definitely — look retro right now, but they held their own quite well back in the days. (We would adopt minimalist graphics about a year later.)
This was another site with a lot of content. We manage to keep the content organized and fairly easy to navigate. We incorporated Javascript and HTML frames effectively and subtly. We also intentionally used fun graphics, which probably look cheesy in this day and age, to keep the browsing experience interesting. As a bonus, we also got to redesign the homepage of the Brown University Engineering Division, so that a link to our swanky new site could be front and center. ;)
