Following up my work for Indonesian Professional Association (IPA) new identity design; after the initial designs and some feedbacks, we finally conclude the new logo for the association.

The budding leaves represents how we as a community of Indonesian professionals in Singapore can help to support each other and to grow together. Red for one of the leaves represents our national colour, the red of our flag, just like Singapore, we too have red-white flag. :) And a stripe is placed between the leaves to help to assure that they do still appear as leaves (instead of something else) when presented in black/white or solid colours.

Following up on the new logo, I did a re-design of the its speech club award bookmarks; and picking up some tips from Making and Breaking the Grids, by Timothy Samara, I’m very happy with how the new design turns out to be.

Reading that book has opened my eyes to a wider perpective of the design world, I was previously afraid that grids will limit your creativity, but after looking at many of the project examples in the book, I was definitely proven wrong.

Now, I think grids in design is similar to what a framework is in software development, it helps you to build a consistent, pre-planned work, with still enough windows to expand, and be different.

And this is a very good article by Khoi Vinh, about how grids can be used in web design; this article also triggers my curiousity to find out more about grids. And thanks to Lucian for that.

UPDATE: Found this amazing collection of notes and articles on designing with grid based approach in Smashing Magazine.

Pricing is always a very sensitive issue, pricing it too much you lose a deal, pricing it too low you make a lost. But what is the right price? And how should you charge, per project, hourly or per retainer basis? These are the hard questions that we all have to deal each day, be you the vendor or the customer.

Brian Fling from Blue Flavor, has written a great article about pricing your project; there are a couple of tips we all can learn from, and at the end he concludes that:

Honesty and transparency should always be the heart of all projects.

And I can’t agree more.

We are meeting up again, this time we manage to get to a proper room with Wi-Fi connection at Central Lending Library, instead of the usual corner at Starbucks.

Thanks to Doug for organising this meetup, and to Ivan Chew, from Singapore National Library Board (NLB) for facilitating the use of this room.

It is the first time we are having presentions, and two of our top brigades are presenting, here is the agenda:

• 7:00pm - Rails Plugins Showcase: Dead simple AJAX and Form testing in Rails (using KRJS and hpricot_form), by Choon Keat
• 7:30pm - FxRuby and ScreenSvr, by Sausheong
• 8:00pm - Questions and Answers

After that, you are forced to hang out a little longer, to get to know each other, have a good discussion and a good time learning from each other.

So free up your time next Thursday, 19 April, 7:00 pm, and see you at Central Lending Library; meeting room is to be confirmed, but you should see one of us at the lobby, if you don’t, we believe you will hack out a way to find the right room.

Hint: Contingency plan, note down my HP number.

Some photos taken about a month ago at lower seletar reservoir. I was there with Roy, it was our virgin visit to the reservoir. Roy said, “Don’t feel bad, you usually won’t come here unless your school teacher organise the trip”. So, I assumed it was not my fault then.

It was a quiet and serene place when we were there, the dragon boat competition had just ended, and a few people were seen throwing their anglers. Although not as big as east coast park, it is a pretty lovely place to relax and read a book.

If you going there, remember to bring a black bag to experiement with these hundreds of tiny white flies hovering our camera bags and suddenly disappeared when it was getting dark.

An african safari shot

SMRT moving fast

And who said we are not trying to make contacts with the outer space.

Today, I have just completed my second Ruby On Rails project, after BookJetty, it was a proposal submission, review and project collaboration system, which behaves very much like Basecamp, focussing on simplicity and interface design user-friendliness.

We thought of doing something different initially, a more conservative approach, but since I was using Basecamp to monitor the project progress, my client was exposed to how simplicity can be really helpful at times.

So I studied how 37Signals did it in more details, and there is really a lot we can learn through observation. One thing I learned the most is that little thing in user interface design is the one that make a difference in user experience, saving a click whenever appropriate makes the difference, not letting user to have a second thought of what your instruction or error message makes the difference.

But learning while coding slows me down too, with dateline catching up each day, life has been tough, especially for the past two weeks, but I am glad that I managed to pull it through; today I’m happy that I have the time to blog again.

For the past few weeks, I have been thinking a lot about how I should move forward with Pluit Solutions. System development and consultancy is fun, but to change the client’s mindset, that we developers need more than 3 days to develop an application from scratch is hard, especially in Asia.

A lot of people has been telling me that I need to build a business, a business runs by itself, it generates money even when you are sleeping; freelancing is not a business, it literally means self-employed. It is the easiest to start but yet it is easiest to fail too, depending on which industry that you are in, but you would agree with me, each year the profit margin just gets lower with competition from the flat world, China and India our two big brothers, and it scared the hell out of me, after reading The World is Flat.

Thus, there are two areas I need to work on, first… a lot of people have been telling me, I need to develop a product. Secondly I need to stay focus; since I’m only employing myself, there is only 24 hours a day, taking out the time I need to wee wee, take shower, breakfast, dinner, lunch, sleep, watch prison break, project runway, and CSI, I won’t have much time left in a day.

Talking about building my first product, the trend now is building a service, since I have been working on project collaboration system for the past few months, I am really keen to build a project collaboration system, but again there is already Basecamp who eats up a big pie of the market size, it is going to be really tough to penetrate as a service.

But how about selling it as a product, though not as pretty as a service, which can be customised if needed too, just like what I did for my client right now, they need something else on top of a project collaboration system, and maybe to those who need to host the system on their own server due to security reasons, or any other reasons. I have yet to put more thoughts on this. If you are company, especially if you are based in Singapore, and you need a project collaboration system, please do drop me a note.

Secondly, I will drop my idea to build JobJetty, I have not started working on it, and it has been months since I started collecting emails. Most likely, I won’t have the time to develop it for the next couple of months too. My apologies if you have signed up to be notified for BETA release, I was just too enthusiastic and naive back then.

On the remaining time that I have, I will further develop BookJetty. There has been some progress made with Singapore NLB, I’m working on an official integration with them, if it works, I hope BookJetty is going to stay for long, and the pending features list gets really long now and seriously need some attentions.

That’s about it, it has been a good day today, hope it is going to stay good for some time, wish me luck.