Feb 1 Fundraiser Dinner

On behalf of the Zambia Barista Committee please join us on Wednesday, February 1st for a spaghetti dinner at the Swedish School located in Long Acres. Dinner will be served from 5:30 pm until 8:30 pm. Cost is just K 50,000 per person and K 30,000 for kids 12 and under. Drinks will be available. There is also a play area for the kids. 

Proceeds from the dinner will help send the 2012 National Barista Champion, Dailess Nalwamba, to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia for the Africa Coffee Championships and to Vienna, Austria for the World Championships. 



(And yes, we all appreciate the irony of and Italian dinner at the Mexican restaurant at the Swedish school to send Zambian baristas to Ethiopia and Austria.  Global Economics, hooray!)

Kodak Moment

World, meet the "Kodak Vest Pocket Autographic Camera"  Produced by Eastman Kodak from 1912-1926, it features a Kodak Anastigmat f 7.7 lens. This model was made Jan 1913 and so is 99 years old.

 This camera has 4 shutter speeds:  1/25, B, T, and 1/50; and 5 f-stops: Moving objects f/7.7, near view & portrait f/11, average view f/16, distant view f/22, and Marine, Clouds and Snow f/32.

 Charles Linberg carried this camera with him on his flights, as did George Mallory and Andrew Irving on what may be the first summiting of Mt. Everest -- 29 years before Hillary and Tenzing's documented climb.  Many of their personal effects were recovered but Irving's body and the expedition's KVP camera was not.  If it is recovered (there are efforts underway to fund a controversial climb to recover Irving's body)

compact and portable, advertised as the "soldier's camera" during WWI, it's utility has outlasted our point-and-shoot nikon by nearly 100 years.

Now, to find some film. 

(It takes Efke R100 127 from Fotoimpex...just in case you are out and about in Berlin)

Thoughts on branding and logo development

A quick glance at the new and re-designed logos in 2011 got me thinking about all the work that goes into what in the end should be a very simple design.  One group wrote an excellent 'behind-the-scenes' piece on a remodel of an existing logo that captures all the minutia that goes into what the client and the public see:  Atlassian logo re-design  Consider that this intense process is a 'simple' redesign and imagine the work that goes into (or...should go into!) creating a unique logo from scratch.

Every client is different, every product is different and every market is different.  And yet designers the world over somehow keep coming up with amazing new ideas, new fonts, new concepts, new....everything.  My favorite part of the Atlassian re-design process is the study of existing humanoid logos.  It really is a challenge to come up with a new and decent way to represent a generic human-type being.  Same for trees. and handprints.

We cleaned up the InHouse Design Studio logo; it's a logo we re-visit in an attempt to keep things fresh, this is version 3 in as many years.  And because most of our work is digital and the fundamental design remains the same small adjustments are not costly.  Once you commit to printing business cards and letterhead and signs, etc, these adjustments can become costly.

We encourage clients to make changes gradually if the cost of updating a logo is cost-prohibitive.  The new artwork can be 'rolled out' gradually as you run out of old cards, as you use up old stationary, as signs fade.  In a perfect world new logos would be 'launched' properly and thrown out into the world with great fan-fare.  You will let me know when this perfect world scenario comes around?

In the meantime, enjoy the sneak peek that Atlassian provides into their design process.