the yauhuinatorThe vast, magnificent desert of Wadi Rum greeted me on the third day. I can’t help feeling a little dwarfed while looking up at the towering sandstone mountains, which the locals fondly call the “Valley of the Moon”.
Around Aqaba by the Tala Bay
12 Dec 2011
In Madaba and onto the Dead Sea
10 Dec 2011
Not too long ago, I went on a little tour around Jordan, that small country I never knew existed. It was the only country in the Middle East not to have oil, so as you can expect, the country is fairly poor. But that doesn’t mean it’s not a nice place.
Upon touchdown at the Queen Alia International Airport in Jordan, I made my way around Madaba – “the city of mosaics”.
On the metro
09 Nov 2011
A random picture I took on the Sydney metro. The windows were awfully dirty and I wasn’t exactly bothered, so you’ll find rough clone stamping here and there.
P1 celebrates new “Potong Stim!™” campaign at ‘Comedy Thursday’
P1 had originally invited me to join them to celebrate their new campaign called “Potong Stim!™” at Zouk KL on 6 October, but it was unfortunate that I couldn’t attend.
They gracefully sent me a copy of the event’s press release with several photos attached so that I didn’t miss anything. Read on to check them out!
Alvin Phey, P1 Associate Director Brand & Consumer Marketing
Let’s talk fonts: Arial, Helvetica, Myriad Pro, Roboto
27 Oct 2011
Lately there has been quite a buzz among the typography community when Google engineer Matias Duarke unveiled the new Android font cheekily-named Roboto. In fact, the common stance going around designers was simple: It appears to be a rip-off of Helvetica. Certain blogs even went so far as to find similarities between the glyphs of Roboto and other popular fonts, and finally concluding that Roboto was nothing more than a “four-headed Frankenfont” with styles varyingly derived from Helvetica, Myriad, Univers, FF DIN, and Ronnia.
At the receiving end of the uproar was famed font designer Christian Robertson, who had in the past designed brilliant fonts such as Dear Sarah and Ubuntu Tilting. People were bewildered that someone so bright could end up creating such a font as Roboto.
However, it must be noted that every designer has their own tastes and art directions. Not everyone would agree to the same viewpoint. And mine is slightly different. To begin this article, I should talk a bit about fonts in general, and how I thought of them – it is entirely opinionated and therefore should be read as such.
WOWLOUD: Cloud music for Malaysians?
Traditionally, we listen to music on offline-storage players – phones, personal stereos, discs, and if you’re that old, even cassettes. Then came cloud music. 2011 has been an exciting year for cloud music, with major unveilings like Google Music and Apple iCloud, and announcements of popular streaming services like Spotify steadily expanding to even more countries.
Unfortunately the availability of most of these services are usually US- and Europe-only, due to licensing restrictions from record label companies. The choices for local users have generally been very narrow, ranging from using VPNs to listening poor-quality streams, and most commonly, simply pirating songs altogether.
Just recently, I heard of a new service called WOWLOUD. At that time, it wasn’t launched yet so the only thing I saw on the site was a simple form to register your interest. I signed up, and just last week I received an email from their team telling me to activate my account. And so I did.
