Reading about Brian's ongoing research into making an improved sketchbook (designsojourn.com) got me thinking - why is a moleskine so expensive?? Notemaker.com.au sells its 130 x 210mm moleskine sketchbook for @$19.95 AUD! WTF?? Excluding the cover and elastic strap, each page is almost 20c! Probably all the marketing and hype (used by Hemmingway/Picasso etc etc) added to the cost.
So I went about making my own. Of course it didn't have the equivalent of Brian's research into it as I'm flying out to Singapore tomorrow and NEED a sketchbook immediately. 7 hours on the plane can mean heaps of ideas. All up, this sketchbook was made for about a dollar.
Ok, I'm home sick today. For some reason my nagging cough wouldn't go away and I'm also sniffling like hell. Tried sleeping but didn't really make it.
So i thought I might just put this youtube video up:-
Yes that's me in 2007 or so when I threw myself in the deep end of design had my own little company. We did a heap of fibreglass mouldings for car audio purposes, and this was the flagship product. I recall about 16 different moulds for 9 makes of cars. It didn't earn me millions but it was my baby and provided for me for about 2 years. Not sure where I heard this, but the best compliment to a design would be imitation. Yep I've seen copies of my products on eBay - exact same thing. So I must say, I'm quite satisfied. Now my little company is gone, sold to a former employee. He now runs it from his garage:)
You can contact him at
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You gotta be joking right? But heaps of people have done it though, on youtube. Quite basic and cumbersome to reload the frame with a plastic sheet but still viable for one-offs. Have a look at this:-
So I thought we might try to make something a bit more permanent and resuable. I invited Justin Alfred for this little garage project. Let's take a walk thought the whole thing.
The students of the undergraduate industrial design program at UNSW held a final exhibition of their work on wednesday the 25th of Nov 2009. I was there for about 2 hours - it was great! Of course I won't have time to write about each and every project that was displayed, so I'll just pick a few that intruiged me the most.
During year 10 in my country of birth (the hot and sweltering Singapore), I chanced across a Product Design exhibition while walking about town. And so I walked in.
That was when my fascination in industrial design began - there was heaps of goodies on show, students looking hip and designing outrageous stuff that would have made Bang & Olufsen take notice (at least that was how I felt then). I was so impressed with this exhibition from Temasek Polytechnic that I signed up to get into their small small intake of 28 persons.
Fast forward 14 years. I'm now a designer at a major signage manufacturer in Sydney Australia. That exciting stuff that I saw back then was actually just a small subset of what industrial designers set out to be. Most people regard the apex of industrial design as being in a design consultancy. Of course, it must be really exciting to work in such a fast-paced environment designing different things every day.
Heaps of people look at designers and think that they shape and style stuff. They look at the latest gadget and praise (mostly) its appearance and functionality. Well what do I do at work? Surprisingly most projects have already been styled by an architect contracted by the client. I don't get to decide what most of the signs I'm working on look like. My primary function at work is to IMPLEMENT and EXECUTE the visuals provided by the client. Oh and believe me it's definitely s**tloads of industrial design.
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