OK after the last post, gotta admit I couldn't sleep with a red perfect pencil in a black cap. Why not just tape the pencil as well coz MT masking tape is so thin the pencil still fits to the cap nicely.
Isn't it wonderful? Everything in black and silver, beneath it wood and metal. Now I can sleep and sketch more prototypes tomorrow.
I kind of love the Faber-Castell Perfect Pencil, a light weighted writing instrument with pencil cap/extender and a built-in sharpener. The only thing I hate about it is the two ugly rubber rings. The more I look at the high-end Graf von Perfect Pencil the more I hate those two rings, and the barrel, and…. well since I can't own a US$250 Graf von Perfect Pencil, I settled to change its look.
It is not a huge hack but taping the metal body black did the job to make those two rubber rings fade into the background, sort of. This is yet another wonder of MT's masking tape, the black tape is especially dark and since it is made from washi paper, it is flexible and handles curved surface well without any wrinkles, and it is removable.
Changing the pencil into a black one actually makes it look a lot smarter. Tie a black ribbon/leather strap around the barrel and onto your neck, it is another conversation starter no doubt about it.
See you in 2010!
You know for retail in Hong Kong, Xmas is huge and we spent a lot of time and energy planning for its arrival and departure. In the past month, I watched almost daily this Treemap visually identifying category composition, which products move and how they perform. In this particular interpretation which I hided confidential information, you can imagine the grids are product categories, the size of the rectangles are sales, height of them are quantity sold, while colors are margin. Don't you think it is highly effective to spot out anomalies or patterns? The best thing about Treemapping is that I can see individual product performance in relation to the whole picture of the department.
I've been using Treemapping for years and eventually settled on a German made Treemap software by Macrofocus. They have constant updates to enhance features and import excel files almost instantly. It has been a great tool for me for the past few years and I feel thankful for such great software development.
If you don't know what Treemap is, check out my previous post "A Visual Person's Links", Treemapping wikipedia or find out some of the treemap images from Google to get a glimpse or to start with.
We used to sell larger versions of these beautiful paper storage boxes from PLUS, the series is called Living Post which is very good for organizing your home and work desktop. This year they released a smaller version which is also cheaper at about HK$98 per piece. Instantly they became our top sellers in Xmas.
Most people have their stationery stuffed in a drawer without classification and eventually a lot of them are not used on regular basis, they are just lying there to be thrown away one day. The problem is, like most of your other stuffs, that without organization, things are not being used to their potential and this is such a waste.
So instead of putting stuffs in drawers, Living Post offers to have your gears accessible on your desktop. Yes you have to create a space for such storage boxes but the payback is guaranteed. You make things beautiful so that they become useful.
I now use a square orange box to store clips, craft related stuffs such as MT masking tapes, leather tools. The large drawer is just the right size for postcard or 4x6 photos, a calculator, Field Notes and Moleskine pocket size notebook fit perfectly well inside. My other narrow black box is used for photo related stuffs such as shutter release, 35mm film canisters, tapes, etc. It also serve as a place to put miscellaneous or temporary stuffs.
The Living Post drawers are tiny but enough. If you are not a stationery freak, chances are you will find it useful in your own ways. Say for storing daily cosmetic stuffs, for a dedicated place to store all your keys and cables, etc.
I wish they have a version with wood pattern which fits perfectly with my desktop theme at home.
If you are a subscriber to Xplane's mailing list, you've probably already received a "Happy Holidays" greeting email from them. For years I've received so many Xmas cards digital or analog I can't distinguish one from another, they all just ended up in trash.
But look Xplane did it again, an eCard you would keep and forward to other people, that's one big achievement you know. Follow this link to download the "Visual Cliché Find-it…" poster and have fun!
So how did Xplane get me to keep their 2008 eCard and anticipating one this year? Here's what they sent last year. Thank you for making a difference Xplane!
Tokyo Biggest Tech Party Ever took place last Thurs. Dec 17th in Roppongi at a club named 57. There was a good turnout of reportedly 400+ people attending. The Poken guys were there as were a group selling a dedicated offline Wikipedia device. I saw and talked with many of the regular Tokyo Technorati as well as some people I hadn't had the pleasure of meeting before. Below are some of the photos from the party, it was a great event.
In Note & Diary Style Book volume 4, a magazine I love, there are 3 pages covering how Spanish photographer Itxaso Zuñiga recorded her journey to Gobi desert in a Traveler's Notebook. I found some interesting techniques by just looking at the way she did it and I'm sharing with you all photo journaling lovers.
- Play with cut-out window of a page to show part(s) of a photo beneath that page. It can be as simple as the example on page one of the magazine, but you can have a lot more fun doing something more complicated, e.g. shoot a photo from inside of a beach house looking through the windows, take another shot of the beach from outside, use the first photo with cut-out windows on a page to show part(s) of the second photo in the next page.
- Take a lot of people photos with shallow depth of field, select one as the key image on one page, put a collage/mosaic of the rest of the people photos on the opposite page. This creates a simple 2 pages of lives you met in your journey, which already tells a lot of the place.
- Use the same technique above but change the topic to "Sky", "Cloud", "Flower", etc.
- Intentionally take a lot of sky, eye-level and ground photos. Use these stock photos to compose a collage, say 5 x 7 photos. On the top rows you put various sky shots, on the bottom rows ground shots. Put either one large photo of an eye-level shot or just follow the grid to fill in photos of objects/scenes/people you shot during the trip. This creates a collage with a central theme but not as obvious because the whole collage is obscured by "background" shots.
- To match a rough theme using a Polaroid (soon to be reproduced again!), peel off the white protective frame to make a square photo which the unexposed chemical formation can be seen on the edges.
- Keep the words simple. A few keywords which capture your feeling is already enough if you decide the journal is more visual. In an example of Itxaso's page, beneath a Polaroid of the Mongolian family she wrote "Nomads Generosity Strong Hospitality Humble Pride".
- Put glue evenly on a page and sprinkle sands and dirts on it. You brought back a piece of the land you once walked on in the journey. Same trick works for plants, feathers and human hairs :P
Lastly, as I often mention in our Travel Photo Cafe talks, to create a beautiful photo journal, equip yourself with a few layouts in mind before the trip, this will help you take more useful shots, collect more interesting objects and create better layouts because you are effectively stocking up useful contents all the time.
From the Museum of Post and Communication: The "Squatting Dog" is an icon of phone designs: 1929, Siemens presented a phone in a radical new design language. Housing and receiver are fused, the apparatus is made of black Bakelite with contrasting white dial is only slightly greater than the then usual phone. The striking design of the phone, which officially bore the name "Model 29", led to the nickname of "Crouching dog" or "ham bone".
Check out the museum's specific page of Hockender Hund in German.
