We’ve done some pretty crazy things here for Design Delish. Folks are still talking about our origami durian, and we’ve got even more crazy stuff coming up in the next few months. So we thought we’d scale back a little this time. Simplify. And look at food in yet another different way.

Inspired by the NounProject, we set out to create an iconset of food and drinks. And not just any food and drinks mind you, we wanted to do the stuff we eat and drink here. Afterall, we always try to put some local street cred into our previous design projects. They are always the fun ones (origami durian notwithstanding). This set consisted of 9 monotone icons, which are durian, steak on the grill, lok-lok, karipap, teh tarik, ketupat, nasi lemak, a bowl of noodles and prawns. Initially it started as a simple study to know how far we could simplify food into a minimal visualization- a bit icon-ish, which serves as a simple drawing to supplement textual information.

Nasi lemak is the hardest to simplify, mainly because it has to remain as what you usually see on your plate -…  Continue reading »

Raya is upon us and we thought we'd give you a little "how to" pictorial on making ketupat. It looks a little complicated at first, but once you get the hang of it you'll be weaving ketupat like a pro! Go on and give it a try.



Step1: Weave the leaf on your right hand into the one on your left in an alternating fashion. Keep holding on to the leaves as you do this. This step takes the most getting used to; concentrate on getting the hang of it.

Step 2: Once done, it should resemble the photo.

Step 3: Take the narrow end of the leaf and weave it upwards, keeping to the alternating pattern. Once you get to the top, take a left turn and keep weaving to that corner. (i.e. weave along two sides of the ketupat)

Step 4: Turn the ketupat around. Repeat the previous step of going up and to the left. (i.e. weave along the other two sides of the ketupat) The narrow ends should now be at the same corner.Continue reading »

A year ago, I bumped into a series of flag designs created out of food for Australian Food Festival. The idea was simple, each flag was composed with traditional food elements that related with each country. And then me and Honey thought, what would it be if it were a Malaysian flag? Would it be made out of nasi lemak? Or chicken curry?

Jalur Gemilang was designed by Mohamed Hamzah in 1947 for the Malaysian flag design competition. The first design was a green flag with blue kris in the middle, surrounded by 15 white stars. The second design, which was among the three finalists, was similar to the current flag but with a five-pointed star. He borrowed major elements from the American flag, by using stripes as the idea to represent the 14 states.

Anyway, Malaysia just celebrated their independence day yesterday, so as scheduled this week would be Merdeka week in FC headquarters. Everyone has their own project and contribution for website content. And I have my own project too!

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This project started when our new intern The Charlie joined us at FC for a short stint. As usual, I was doing some research on food and design projects while talking about random ideas with her when we somehow thought of making food origami. We initially wanted to stick a few pieces of paper together to construct different food shapes, but we wanted more of a challenge. After figuring out what to make, The Charlie and I decided to make a durian. We researched sites to figure out the structure from scratch. It was a day for origami enthusiasts like us to get busy pressing play and pause on polyhedron tutorial videos while patiently folding sonobes. Surprisingly, that makes us happy...we're weird that way.



This durian structure is made up of a number of identical sonobes, or ‘pieces’. Making this model involved constructing and folding the appropriate number of pieces and then assembling them according to the pattern.
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Building a city out of cookies is not a new idea. In fact, many people have done it before, be it by stacking cookies to imitate the city, or by simply making a cake that is in the shape of a building. This makes a great analogy between cooking and architecture, where both can be seen as lofty art or simply as a humble craft.



I was talking to a friend who's working on some construction projects when this came to mind. When he talks about materials related to construct a building, I think of the juxtaposition from a food perspective. And a simple one that I came up with was cookies.


These are like the bricks/cement

The raw ingredients used to make cookies can be deemed similar to the materials used to build buildings. We have flour as the cement that is known as the principle structure builder.…  Continue reading »

I was away from the office last week travelling with a troupe of design enthusiasts. Our destination was Bangkok, Thailand, currently known as one of the hot spots for creative talent. Here, wit and humour is often injected into the culture. Apart from the delicious tom yam and foy thong, Bangkok is known as the most creative city in Southeast Asia.

With the other creative peeps from Design Circus, I had the chance to attend the Bangkok Design Festival 2009. The festival itself was held in few places in the city, I however was only able to attend the exhibits at the Bangkok Arts and Cultural Center.

The Bangkok Arts and Cultural Center (BACC), located in the Sukhumvit area, is where you can find many interesting shop lots that sell refined artsy stuff. It showcases a variety of art forms such as graphic design, interiors, architecture, movies, music, theatre, graffiti and more. I spent a couple of hours there checking the exhibits out one by one, until I finally bumped into this particular place and I was in awe.

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