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.