18 Mar
   Filed Under: Gaming   

I love games. Most of the time, I play fast-paced, exciting, enthralling, or scary games that have my heart racing and keep my adrenalin levels high. For once, however, I got the chance to play a game that departs from this convention. Flower, a Playstation Network title and a PS3 exclusive, is a game that’s — believe it or not — actually relaxing to play.

This may sound really boring, like describing a fancy new version of Mahjong for the game console, but it’s really not. I found Flower to be a uniquely captivating experience.

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17 Mar
   Filed Under: Apple, Design, Interface Design, iPhone   

Apple’s iPhone software 3.0 event came and went without a mention or hint at new hardware. There have been a lot of rumors about a possible new iPhone, and a lot of these rumors assumed a potential connection between this new software for the iPhone and the new hardware, which could be unveiled around the time of WWDC this year.

I posed a question on Twitter earlier today, and since there’s (unsurprisingly) been no mention of it today, I wanted to get my thoughts down on this difficult issue Apple faces when it comes to the future of the iPhone platform. At some point in the future, iPhones and iPod touches will get a better screen, with a better resolution. A good example is the move of Apple’s flagship notebook, the Macbook Pro 17″, from a 1680 by 1050 pixel resolution screen, to a high-DPI (dots per inch) screen boasting an impressive 1920 by 1200 pixels. The screen remained the same size in inches; it just packed a lot more pixels in each inch of screen size.

This happens in the arena of mobile devices as well. Some modern cell phones feature screens with a massive resolution of 800 by 600 pixels; comparably, the iPhone offers a ‘meagre’ 480 by 320 pixels. In the future, Apple will change to a better (not necessarily ‘bigger’) screen, and developers of iPhone apps will face a huge issue: how do we scale the interface?

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09 Mar
   Filed Under: Design, Logo Design, Personal Work   

Sometimes, you get the strangest, yet most appealing ideas walking down the street instead of when you’re at your desk nibbling on a pencil. It just hits me, sometimes before I go to sleep, or when I’m waiting in a queue. More often than not, I forget the idea, but lately I’ve been putting them into my iPhone, in a list. And when I looked back at that list yesterday, I found one particularly interesting.

“Design a series of corporate brand identities based on Pokémon.”

Guys? Stay with me here. When I was about eleven years old, I played a Pokémon game on a gameboy emulator on my PC, and I still think the creatures that Ken Sugimori designed are very iconic, characteristic designs. The crazy idea of doing some logotype work for them enticed my curiosity enough to actually do some work on it in my spare time. Here we go: corporate brand design, the Pokémon edition.

If you like it, please digg it.

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