Purchase David Pu’u works here at our Studio Shop.

Please join Pi Design as we launch our new venture, Pi Studio Printing. We are opening our doors on March 12th to artists, photographers, friends, family, clients, and design professionals! To showcase the capabilities of our latest addition to the Pi family—the giant Epson Stylus Pro 11880 printer, we will be showing the breathtaking work of David Pu’u, editorial photographer and cinematographer. David will be in attendance and to share his experiences traveling the world photographing and filming surfers, sea life and other wondrous phenomena.

Please join us for refreshments and great company as you tour the Pi Studio Printing facility. This grand event takes place two days prior to our favorite holiday, Pi Day! In honor of this glorious day we will, of course, have much pie on hand as well as other roundish treats.

Pi Studio Printing will be raffling off all kinds of great prizes like gift certificates to Vie, the Spa upstairs, David Pu’u prints and more!

Leave work a bit early on Friday and come have some pie with Pu’u. (Sorry, I just couldn’t resist.)

When: March 12th 2010 from 3:30pm to 6:30pm
Where: 760 Las Posas Road, Suite A1 and A2, Camarillo, CA

To RSVP click here

Read more about David Pu’u here: http://www.davidpuu.com/bio.php

We had such a great response to our previous post on this subject matter that we compiled the comments to craft these new gems added a few more submissions of our own. Thanks (and apologies) go out to Barbara, Kathleen, Jerry Lund, Joe Howard, Ed at CR Print and Josh Brown for their comments, which we so selfishly tweaked to fit our twisted thought process.

1. I already have an idea for my logo, on this bar napkin, and I shouldn’t have to pay someone just to stick it on a 3.5″ x 2″ piece of paper along with my name and phone number. Can’t you just make copies of it? Oh, but I want to make the letters nice and clean and maybe spruce up my drawing a bit.
2. I can download free fonts and a paint program to create an effective brochure for my upcoming trade show… Can’t I?
3. 4 Colors?! WTF?! There are billions of colors in the world and that !@$#@ designer only wanted to print with 4 of them?!?!? (more…)

A Tale of Two Cards

There are a constant barrage of business cards left on my front porch from tree trimmers, cleaning folks, landscapers, gardeners and others insinuating that I am not doing a very good  job of these things myself. I don’t take offense because I am busy and don’t put as much attention into my house as I probably should. Hopefully my friends and family get that and don’t think less of me. But, as I am sort of in the market for a cleaning person, I kept two cards in particular from last week. (more…)

In order to help the designer truly capture the essence of your company when designing or redesigning your corporate identity it is necessary to provide them with some background material. This is often done with a design brief but simply answering these questions should give any designer a great head start in the right direction.

1. What services and/or products do you offer?
2. How would you describe your corporate culture?
3. What makes your company unique? (more…)

by Joel Dualan

Before we begin, I feel it only appropriate to preface this article with a public service announcement, brought to you today by Pi Design:

Friends don’t let friends use comic sans.
Together we can overcome.

With that out of the way we can now proceed.

You might be thinking to yourself (at least I hope you are), “Who in their right mind would choose to use that typeface for a wanted poster?” This example is clearly a dramatization to illustrate a point, but I kid you not, the poster was based on a real life example.

Choosing typefaces to use for your project isn’t something that can be determined by answering a few predefined questions. There isn’t a set of rules that are written in stone that designers can refer to, but we instead rely on years of education and experience to lead us to the best choice. When faced with the task of choosing a typeface, many factors must be considered, but among these, content, media, and audience should be considered foremost.

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Another post from the purposely silly “This Looks Awsome” Series (yes, we know it’s spelled wrong. It was done on purpose to be silly, you nit)

1. Create your project in any program with “Microsoft” in the name. You’d be better off finger-painting with mud on an old pizza box, dousing it with gasoline and throwing it briskly into a portal to hell.
2. OPTIMA OPTIMA OPTIMA. Did I forget to mention that use of COMIC SANS will also immediately discredit you as a designer?     (more…)

My daughter has kept herself busy this summer creating origami animals and geometric shapes out of paper, Post-it notes in particular. I, too have always had a fascination with paper. I love the different textures and colors, especially those of the handmade variety. Fashioning something three-dimensional from a flat sheet requires extreme patience while completing a challenging combination of cutting and folding in just the right places. I have been amazed by the tiny things she does like the miniature presents in this photo. She will often cut a Post-it note down to a half inch square and fold microscopic origami cranes that sit on your fingertip

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AeroVironment provides us with constant work. We love everything about them. They are great people to work with and the technology they develop is awe-inspiring. From clean technology solutions to unmanned aircraft systems, they have consistently provided breakthrough engineering since the early 1970’s.

This video reveals the progress on their latest gadget, a flapping robo-sentinel. It is the first-ever hovering air vehicle to use flapping wings while carrying its own power source. The hope is that the hummingbird will be useful for indoor and outdoor surveillance, as well as dropping off listening devices and other super-spy cargo.

Check out their website for more info on their other products:

http://avinc.com/

Good design doesn’t always require super creative genius. Armed with a basic understanding of typography, you, the non-designer can create well-designed, professional looking business documents that can carry your brand image to the next level. Note here though that great design, however, does require a certain level of genius and professionals like us should be hired for the really complicated stuff.

Typography involves the selection of appropriate typefaces and their arrangement on the page. Bad typography practices can negatively affect the reader’s view of your company. Good ones should be invisible, placing the focus on the content of the document and not the totally cool typeface you chose.         (more…)

12 Reasons Why You Don’t Need to Redesign Your Website…Yet

1. The flashing, pulsating, blinking bright yellow boxes with the red text on your home page look pretty.
2. No one ever contacts you from your site anyway…or at least they don’t stay long enough or dig deep enough to find the contact information which was supposed to appear on the home page but for some reason shows up on the third page of services and you have to scroll to the right to see it.
3. Your site loads rather quickly. By the time you make a cup of coffee and get back to your desk the home page is almost completely up.
4. It doesn’t matter that your site is all messed up when viewed in IE6 or Firefox because it looks just fine in Netscape. (more…)