Kora Cuff

Amy with Master Carver, Tongo Léon Kayenya

Kora’s socially and aesthetically conscious philosophy brings the beauty of unique jewelry to a new light. Kora avidly supports sustainability of local businesses in developing countries by taking discarded horns thrown out by butchers and metamorphosing them into beautiful pieces of jewelry and teaching the people of Rwanda valuable business skills.

In developing Kora’s website, we chose full screen images of the exquisite jewelry pieces as a background display for each page. Built using a Content Management System (CMS), the website is easily accessible to update new products and content seamlessly. As our client was in Africa during the development phase of website, our transcontinental correspondence via Skype proved to be quite successful.

For more details in Kora’s philosphy and design of the unique jewelry pieces, visit koradesigns.com.

Crawfish Bracelet by Nicholas Varney

Quahog Pearl Earrings by Nicholas Varney

We deal with a lot of jewelry clients, each with a unique product and point of view. It’s exciting to express that point of view for every client. However, we were especially thrilled when we were approached by Nicholas Varney to design his website. His larger-than-life personality is something that translates into his jewelry, and even that might be putting it lightly.

With pieces that should be hanging in a museum rather than on earlobes, Nicholas creates masterpieces that take inspiration from nature. He has the power to transform the mundane crawfish (or any other little critter) into an exorbitant and bejeweled sculpture. His idiosyncratic approach to jewelry design was an easy source of inspiration for us. Taking cues from his conceptual sketches, which are beautiful in their own right, we created a website design that captured the process of his beautiful work. We took his artistic craftsmanship and little organic pieces of art and injected it with some very modern web technologies to create a site that was highly charming and functional.

The entire site is built with a Content Management System (CMS) which allows for easy updating. It offers another advantage we have been dying to use. Nicholas can assign customers like Bergdorf Goodman a login to his site so they can see a special inventory list not available to the rest of the viewing audience. So the site not only acts as a beautiful gallery of his portfolio, but as a practical business tool as well.

Click Here to view the new Nicholas Varney site.

79 Short Essays on Design by Michael Bierut

Michael Bierut starts the book by saying that he is a designer and not a writer. Yet each short essay, about two pages on average, is so well-written that it doesn’t feel like writing at all; rather a conversation that you are having with your college design professor. This may have something to do with the fact that most of the essays are taken from a blog, a medium that is popularized by the casual way it communicates with its audience. Sixty-eight of the 79 articles are from the Design Observer blog. It’s one of the leading blogs on design as well as one of the best designed I have read.

This is the kind of book you keep on your coffee table and pick up for short 15 minute reads while you’re waiting for your teapot to boil or killing some time before you head out for the night. However, I found myself carrying the book all over. I read it on the subway, while waiting for friends at a cafe and bulldozing through half a dozen essays before bed. Each composition offered something completely different, but they all hold together with one underlining theme; you guessed it—design. Most design books tend to focus on the technical or critical aspects, but Michael’s (and I feel I can refer to him on a first-name basis after reading the book) 79 Short Essays have a tendency to talk about design without ever really touching the subject. Musings about running on a tread mill, an autobiography by a playwright or the life of a blues musician all seem to speak more about the design process than, say, Bringhurst’s The Elements of Typographic Style.

Some of the more memorable discourses for me were the essays where Michael talks about his own interactions with clients and design problems while working as a designer, such as “The Road to Hell: Now Paved with Innovation.” He is remarkably candid about his own doubts, imperfections and even narcissism. As a designer we are often expected to know the perfect solution to a particular problem and that can be a lot to carry sometimes. So it’s nice to see that even such an accomplished designer such as Mr. Beirut faces the same problems as myself and continues to learn and better himself in his professional career. It’s inspiring really.

Of course the design of the book is fantastic. One minor issue I had was that each essay is composed with a different typeface. I get as excited about typography as much as any other designer, and it was fun trying to guess the font of each essay, but I felt it was unwarranted and a little distracting. Other than that, the attractive and simply executed, bright yellow cover (designed by Abbott Miller), the well structured layout and the super heavy text weight stock (or is that a cover weight) all support the equally accomplished writing. Unfortunately, I hauled the book with me everywhere I went for a month and the cover became heavily worn. It is such a beautifully crafted book I plan on buying another copy to keep in pristine condition on the shelf while I re-read the former at my own pace.

Close up of the Jewelry

View of the Loft

View from the Loft!

Now that the party is over, we are looking forward to helping them with their branding and more in the near future!

All in all it was a very pleasant surprise for an otherwise normal workday. Surprises are something of a specialty for Val; whether it’s jumping out from behind a pole on the street or a birthday trip to a bowling alley in the middle of the day. It turns out she had one more surprise for us—the high score with a wicked curve and perfect form.

Pix Design at Port Authority

Suiting Up

Ricky, Valerie and Andy Show Off Their Bowling Form

Time to Get Serious

Andy Has a Mad Men Moment

Flowchart of Journey Under the Sea

Michael Niggel, an information designer from Vermont, has taken it upon himself to create a flowchart to Choose Your Own Adventure #2: Journey Under the Sea. Using the data from the flowchart, Michael was able to create some graphs. The conclusion is that you will most likely conclude with an unfavorable resolution. One interesting deduction from the information is that there are just as many favorable endings as fatal ones, yet you have a much, much higher chance of arriving at the latter. While visually, this is very interesting to look at, it kind of takes the romance out of the fantasy. Download the PDF here.

Choose Your Own Adventure Chart Info

Choose Your Own Adventure Chart Info

Anyway, here’s some photos from our Flickr stream of our busy morning.

Update: Thanks to all-knowing-all-seeing Urijah for noticing a broken link to Advanced Printing!

That’s right, we are no longer a part of the anti-social network and have joined ranks of millions of status-updating, link-tweeting, picture-sharing, soul-baring individuals. After touting the benefits of such social media to our clients, we decided to lead by example. Be sure to become our friend, fan, contact and/or connection and follow our every step on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and even Flickr. Expect lots of updates on all of the above as well as some serious attention to our blog. See ya in cyberspace!

Eastridge Design Room

Anyone who knows Pix Design, knows that we love working with clients from creative industies. So we were ecstatic when we were approached by Eastridge Design to redo their website. Eastridge Design had a very strong brand in place and even though they had beautiful photos of their work, their previous website failed to deliver. We built a clean, open and easy-to-navigate site which reinforces their existing brand. Even though the site may appear simple, the prudent attention to detail showcases the high quality of work.