Across The Jungle Line
A photo series from my first-ever train trip on the KTM railway. I travelled from Singapore, through Gemas, and all the way up to Kota Bahru. Join me on my rail trip here.
Archived entries for VISUALS
Tanjong Pagar Railway Signage
One of the things that makes Tanjong Pagar railway station distinctly Malaysian for me is its signage. Like the Malaysian flag, the signs are in blue and yellow.
The typeface used in the signs also evokes memories of another era. The guys at Typophile have correctly nailed the typeface as ITC Serif Gothic, which was designed in 1972 by Herb Lubalin and Tony DeSpigna. This was forty year after the station was completed, so the signs are actually quite a recent installation.
WIKIMEDIA COMMONS \ Jason Devadason
This sign was removed in 2004.
Old Playgrounds in Singapore
Dragons, watermelon, bumboats and doves — these were just some designs of public playgrounds built from the 1970s to early 1990s in Singapore. Built by the HDB, they were based on local themes and icons, and were unique spaces for a generation of Singaporeans who grew up with fond memories of them.
This is an on-going project. View photos of the playground and find them to relive your childhood!
UPDATE
Read my article at CNNGo for a short history of these playgrounds or my Singapore Architect essay on what we’ve lost with their passing. Also in the works — a more detailed history of the playgrounds and I may have tracked down its designer…
Don’t design in a vacuum!
Some people wonder why designers need to do research. Well, here’s my own experience in designing a logo for a magazine and not checking out its competitors!
This is a logo I did for a publication. The concept was:
Mix Magazine brings together a diversity of ideas and insight from around the world to students in Singapore. This is represented by the ‘little red dot’ that sits at the equatorial line of the blue globe.
Depending on the issue’s theme, the area between the world and Singapore becomes a canvas to allow Mix to playfully express a customised logo.
Alas, it turned out that one of its competing publication is The Straits Times’ Little Red Dot, whose logo looks like this:
So, my logo design was perceived to look too similar to a competing product, and it didn’t make the cut. Lesson learnt!
The Last Job
On a recent trip to see the exhibition of my Final-Year Project’s photo overseas, one of my project partners and I were inspired to create a comic using photos he had taken of the cities of London and Belfast. “The Last Job” is a comic book created with photographs from Sam Kang Li and laid by myself on Comic Life.
