June 2010
1 post
May 2010
2 posts
1 tag
Leaving Onzo
I’ve left Onzo after working there for almost two years. It was an interesting time and impossible to sum up in a post. However, when I read ‘Ten rules for start ups’ by one of Twitter’s founders I thought it described the experience pretty well - I think we bumped up against every one of these in my time there:
#1: Be Narrow Focus on the smallest possible problem you...
February 2010
1 post
3 tags
“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we...”
– Albert Einstein (via the excellent mrsamweller)
January 2010
6 posts
“Stories trump statistics”
– Zainab Salbi - Iraqi American writer, activist and social entrepreneur
via @johnmaeda at davos
1 tag
Design in the backwoods
Really enjoyed a series of blog posts about the design and meaning of signage in and around the National parks of Northern Wisconsin by Richard Bucht. The posts are a great read - opinionated and multi-referenced they’re really similar to having a conversation with Richard himself at the Garrick St Waterstone’s.
The signs are natural and easy going. Being hand-crafted from the woods...
2 tags
Maths doesn't change behaviour
I love Calvin and Hobbes! To me, this strip highlights the problem with the approach that a lot of organisations take with behaviour change: the insistence on quantifying everything.
How can we expect to change behaviour if people don’t care?
Know your audience!
The WHSmith at London City airport showcases finance, ski and wine books instead of the usual John Grishams and Dan Browns. They know what interests their audience of well heeled, picky business travellers. What are your audience interested in?
December 2009
5 posts
1 tag
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“Don’t have any meetings about your web strategy. Just do stuff. First you...”
– From a post about how an organisation can catch-up on web strategy on Seth’s Blog
1 tag
November 2009
7 posts
“Question everything generally thought to be obvious.”
– Dieter Rams (exhibition at Design Museum)
1 tag
A Japanese street jazz band giving a lunch time concert is pretty much the last thing you expect to see outside a photography shop. That’s what I love about Lomo and what makes them such a great brand. They understand that life is all about the exciting things that happen when you mix it up.
3 tags
A celebration of supreme utility
Functional and intriguing. Rare and humble. Useful and special. The products on show at the Kiosk meets SCP collaboration during London Design Week are oxymoronic. And therefore fascinating.
Even the act of going to see products like these, displayed like this, is contradictory. Products as plain as laundry clips and drain plugs are displayed like works of art: hung on the walls with little...
1 tag
Meddling parent brands
Why would you do this?
Why add your parent brand logo to a thriving brand? Especially when the Flickr community are hugely loyal? And the Yahoo brand is looking a little grey and lost.
Such meddling control freakery is bad parent behaviour and just makes Flickr look uncool.
2 tags
Rock on
The bad news: the cables on my headphones broke.
The good news: Rather than having to buy a new pair all I had to do was replace a cable. Designing for re-use says “we value long-term relationships over short-term sales”.
1 tag
October 2009
8 posts
“Time was, music was collective experience you had at a concert, or listening to...”
– Conduit Labs
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Fresh(Jive) talk
Interesting to read that Freshjive is dropping its logo as of 2010. I first read about it on the excellent PFSK blog, which stated that it was going logoless and brandless. In a second interview with PFSK, Rick Klotz, Freshjive’s founder / owner described the new black square logo as “the same labeling we’ve been running on our garments, less the brand name on it”.
So, Freshjive are removing...
2 tags
Going Dutch
Behold my new steed - the Gentleman’s Glorie. Having missed the fixie wave the only way to go was Dutch. And after a visit to the excellent Bobbin bicycles I realised the only way to go was Dutch with pedal back brakes and unisex frame. I think unisex frame is polite for girls frame, but what the hey I’m loving this bike.
The upright position totally changes your perspective. You...
1 tag
Images, format and meaning
I used to take tons of photos. The first camera I remember using was some pseudo-iconic Kodak 35mm camera I bought in Boots in a blister pack. It was small and brown. Photos taken with it were unremarkable, but real. Like bad Martin Parr.
Then my friend Tom introduced me to lomography. Colour saturation! Vignettes! Cross processing! The 10 rules of Lomography - shoot from the hip, don’t...
1 tag
Building brands from the deadpool
I saw this notice on a door of a closed down cafe in Soho:
Shame because they made an excellent pastrami on rye.
I really like how even though you can’t go in there to buy lunch anymore they are still expressing their brand values - the guy is thanking his team and striving for an interesting future. And doing so in an upbeat and true way. What could your brand be remembered for?
September 2009
1 post
1 tag
Dr Pseudo-design. Or how I learned to stop...
Reality TV and Philippe Starck both drive me nuts. Or at least the ego-driven pointless schmaltzy pseudo-design that he creates drives me nuts. So, I was expecting to be driven into a rage by ‘Design for Life’ - a reality TV show featuring Phillipe Starck.
But I enjoyed it. Damn. And … I like Philippe Starck. There i said it. Doubledamn! I liked how he put a bunch of...
July 2009
1 post
1 tag
Brands that play
Gutted about MJ. But, I love how people have been playing with the Twitter brand to show their feelings. Billie Tweet (Billie Jean set to other people’s tweets) is incredible. And I like the Fail Whale with the MJ twist:
It made me think about brands that people can play with. People like to play. It is part of human nature; experimenting with, adding to and using in new ways has helped...
June 2009
2 posts
1 tag
Sock Hack
I love hacking, in the “modification of a program or device to give the user access to features that were otherwise unavailable” sense of the word. As Mr Jalopy says “if you can’t open it, you don’t own it”. But it’s difficult. And time consuming. All those soldering irons, lines of code and tweaking things! No-one said it was easy.
Which is why I’m...
1 tag
Yo! World
Hello.
Welcome to my blog. I’m going to fly in the face of accepted blog wisdom and instead of exclusively blogging about a micro-niche like bamboo bikes I’m going to blog about things I find interesting. Like laser graffiti and bamboo bikes.
Most things here will in some way revolve around the topics I find interesting: brands, design, marketing, sustainable behaviour, photography.
...