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…)

1. You really, really like Comic Sans and think it is perfect typeface for all your business documents.
2. I don’t need graphics. I just want a company logo, brochure, website and trade show booth.
3. Joe, the IT guy, knows how to stretch and squish photos and place them into PowerPoint to make cool trifolds we can just print out on our desktop printer.
4. Because you KNOW that people will look at your ad longer if you fill every inch of it with all the information they ever needed to know about your product.
5. You have all the special effects you could ever need in Microsoft PowerPoint. You know, like rainbow gradients and bevel emboss. (more…)

As I become more involved with trying to decipher the social media mystery and how to use it effectively in marketing I thought I would really hate TWITTER. I figured it would be just another social media distraction in my already crazy busy day. I have found just the opposite to be true. Just like Flower, Thumper and Bambi, I am twitterpated. You know, that flighty exciting feeling you get when you think about the object of your affection. Twitter is not as all consuming as I thought it might be. People are not just posting tweets about what they are doing at the moment. They are posting helpful, insightful tips and useful links. It is a tool where you can connect with all kinds of people in a quick, professional way. I find that I am excited to check what new info is waiting out there provided by people that I know have similar interests. In the last year the number of people in the U.S. using Twitter has exploded. According to statistics from compete.com the site grew from 4.1 million monthly visitors in February 2008 to 54.2 million last month.

In reading other people’s tweets, I have run across many interesting articles. One of which is about the many ways social media is changing the way we, as designers and marketers, work.

Check it out: The 10 Ways Social Media Will Change in 2009

This one gives good insight into The 90/10 Rule of Successful Twittering

While reading Frank Lane’s, “Killer Brands” the other day I learned that slogan originally meant a Scottish battle cry. So I am now imagining Pi Design’s new marketing campaign…a panty-less Mel Gibson rallying the design troops to meet the impossible deadlines whilst screaming something about FREEDOM OF DESIGN. Everyone waves their X-Acto knives and T-squares in the air furiously as they prepare for the battle against time.

(more…)

As 2008 comes to a close and we wrap up another year, we here at Pi Design would like to wish you the happiest of holidays – whichever ones you may be celebrating. As times change and cultures come together, more and more holidays are being noticed publicly around the world. It’s a wonderful thing to partake the different customs and celebrations that the diverse inhabitants of our planet enjoy.

(more…)

We sometimes get people who show up in our office and say, “I need a website.” They don’t really know what exactly they want or how many pages it will be. So we talk to them for a while to get the details all down on paper and then we struggle to provide what we think is an accurate quote only to find out they realized that they will need to add three more pages or they decided a CMS feature on the home page would be cool. And, oh by the way, could we provide all the content too? All the confusion could easily be avoided with a well thought out design brief. So I thought it would be a good idea to provide some simple guidelines to make the process much less painful for everyone and allow us to drive straight to the design part as soon as possible.

(more…)