Posts from the 'personal whatever' Category

Coca-Cola cans and the new minimal

In general it’s worth watching how big brands redesign their products from time to time. Whether it’s carmakers applying facelifts to their vehicles, or Coca-Cola tailoring its image for a new audience, the design trends they follow can be determined with great accuracy.


London 2012 and Summer 2011 cans (images from DesignBoom and TheAWSC)

The idea for this blog post came from Coca-Cola’s limited-edition cans which they created for the USA team on the London Olympics 2012. Having Coke’s colors and image as a base, the graphics made full use of Transport For London’s strong corporate identity: its very minimalistic style is blended in the design as well as the original Johnston typeface.

Minimal is not completely new for Coca-Cola, last year they unveiled a summer collection that had a similar touch to it: simple silhouettes of every day objects with the company’s logo in them. That gives us a great opportunity to observe how “minimal” changed in a year.

Now, at least for London, the graphics became much softer, cleaner, the forms lack those sharp edges and tiny lines – but they are not monochrome anymore. The designers applied more shades of red, white and grey and even blue – and seem to used more tools: drop shadows, overlaying objects etc. With all these tweaks, the new can designs look cleaner and more minimal, while having significantly more detail. Quite a few magicians working there.

Called the Coca-Cola ‘Eight-Pack’, the cans designed by design studio Tucker Duckworth feature graphical silhouettes of some of Team USA’s Olympic champions, medalists and hopefuls in action within their sports.

More Coke cans from the last four decades at coke-cans.com.

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Sea captain vs startup leader

During the last two weeks I was on a sailing course to become a licensed skipper. On the training ships, we changed the roles from time to time: everyone was on command for a while, as well as did some sunbathing on the prow – so that we could observe some leader archetypes at work.


Image for illustration purposes. Source.

Directing 2-4 people for a common goal is something I do a lot – and so did the others I was with: on our boat everyone had a company or office, but at least some projects to run. Our approach to leadership could be described by the way we were captaining the ship.

The nervous one wanted to have control over every task alone, and ended up micromanaging the team. The tasks were too many to pay attention to all of them though, and the boat did sudden moves – which, on stormy waters could lead to emergencies, and in breeze, slows the boat down to zero. Not to mention that the mood on the deck is not the best when someone is yelling all the time.

The silent one doesn’t say anything, just controls the ship and waits for everyone to follow the lead and do the job alone. The only problem is that on a sailing boat you have to set up everything according to the wind – and if the ship changes directions, your wind will come from somewhere else, too. Giving enough time for the crew to get ready for those events is key to keep the boat going.

The know it better guy, well, knew everything a bit better – and ignored even the instructor’s advices. Not listening to your crew might make you seem to be confident, but there are some objects or things you simply can’t see from where you are standing. Ignoring ideas and point of views leaves you with some missing opportunities, or perhaps puts your ship into unnecessary danger.

The dodderer was unsure what to do until the point when something really had to happen. Then he tried to do all tasks in a second – and ended up to be the nervous one: yelling, acting in haste and eventually missing the route, slowing down the ship and putting the crew in danger with ropes and rigs going every direction.

The undecided was even unsure if he’s in command. If you don’t know where you are leading your team, you probably are not leading them anywhere.

Which one of these was me? In the beginning of the course I was all of them – and hopefully, with time, I’ll end up being none. I learned a lot about running a ship (and a business!), and will try to keep a few principles on a ship and in my teams as well.

First, have and communicate a clear vision: if everyone knows exactly what the common goals are, they can think together and not only follow the orders been told. That way everyone has time to get ready for all moves, and eventually, the ship “controls itself”: it’s smoother, faster, and takes considerably less effort to drive.

Second, listen to the team members. From different point of views you see a whole different slice of the world – the clearer you see the picture, the more accurate decisions you can make.

Third, adapt. Sometimes if you want to go straight, you have to turn a few times before to get to your point faster. In a company, being unable to change will eventually put you out of business.

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Search for a missing one

When I had a short visit near Lilienfeld in Austria, the news were all about a young guy, who went missing after a concert on a school holiday’s evening. Franz Kendler has not returned home to this day, but there are other things to the search that are the mention worth.


Fotos: BI Werner Planer, FF Wiesenfeld (from this article)

The villages in the area are those small ones with only a few hundred inhabitants, and since this case was the most important news around, I heard the gossips right after crossing the town sign. Therefore, most of the information I had were guesses – ranged from optimistic to pessimistic, and even some dark ones involving pedophiles, a stranger immigrant girl’s family, alcohol overload, new kinds of drugs, and my favorite: the Chinese mob.

Gossips is nothing new though. What I’ve found interesting is how small part modern technology was playing here. Even in a world with smart phones, all day data and network connection, the most peaces of information coming from these devices was, where the phone was last connected to the network – for me, this was rather scary.

A few years ago, as an ad creative, I was working with a worldwide security services group on a product for parents: it was a simple alert system for young children, with a permanent GPS connection and a 15-minute response unit. Since then, this technology got really cheap: nowadays you can follow your friends on Latitude, check your iPhone’s position via iCloud, and there are apps specially designed for parents.

Only one thing left unchanged: if you are alone with no one listening to those signals, even after a few hours, there is not a lot of chance to track you down. It seems to be therefore that to be on the safe side, you are better of to take some friends with you everywhere – all those apps and fancy devices are good for gaining false confidence only.

Without friends looking after us, we better don’t get lost – otherwise the only chance left may be a milk carton campaign.

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Train

I have the tendency to buy flights tickets only a few days before departing, which makes it all much, much more expensive as it should be. And it leaves me with the opportunity to travel a lot by train.

I wouldn’t say that train trips per se are a good thing, for one, because I love to work on airports (yes, it’s a fact: if you work on airports than you are important!) The last Berlin-Vienna trip on the other hand was something I would have again anytime, we had such a great time for those 9.5 hours on the train.

It was great thanks to the following:

  • I was traveling with Katrin; traveling in two is always more fun
  • Full charged laptop battery – I actually managed to be efficient for those 4 hours they lasted
  • Perfect weather: rain and cold outside makes the whole thing freaking romantic
  • Well chosen book: there is no single peace that suits train trips better than 80 days around the world
  • The new Japandroids album

What could have made it even better: good coffee and cleaner toilets, maybe.

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Frederique is back

Teenagers have dreams about drawing famous comics – or was it just me? Whichever it is, I was drawing like crazy with the age of 18.

Those first strips were of course boring, but the main character, Frederique was already there. A few years after, with a help of a friend some more characters were born: a talking chicken in the fridge, some guys always high on weed, and one who was similar to a goofy guy we both knew. Most of them never actually appeared in any of the strip – but the basement has been done. And now it’s time to build the house. (Evil laugh.)

For now, Frederique will appear on it’s Facebook page, and I’ll figure later how to make it part of the blog.

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The importance of being idle

Achievements for this weekend: walking the distance of marathon, sleeping next to a dog, and signing up for a sailing course.


People partying on the top of a working street sweeper in Berlin, after “Karneval der Kulturen”

I can quite agree with those who follow a perfect daily routine to achieve their goals; I tried Pomodoro and GTD myself, and I believe that all sorts of works can be done faster and more efficient if you set up some rules and follow those. On the other hand: the goals to choose from is almost infinite, and in my field, creativity is rated at least as high as the amount of ticks in your todo list.

So training for that with having some days playing football in the park actually makes sense – let’s try to get payed for that.

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Bike repaired

Breaking news: new tires on my bike! (More in this post: procrastinating and laziness.)

As always, when it comes to tasks that seem to be rather inconvenient, we need a trigger to do those: we take down the garbage when the whole kitchen smells, we go to the dentist when the bad looking tooth starts to hurt – and we change the tires on our bikes when it’s not at all safe to ride anymore.

Or not even then. I should have bought the new tires a long, long time ago, but I kept using it for the last half a year, and did another few hundred kilometers on them – luckily, without any accidents. The trigger in my case was a friend with a flat tire near my apartment and the ever stronger feeling that I’m going to die the next corner.

So, at last, from today on I’m a happy urban cyclist again, riding on a safe – but still rather ugly – bike. And this all took 30 minutes tops (by the way: thanks Katrin for the help).

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Addiction

Berlin is famous of being kind to drug addicts: regardless of what you take it’s easy to get it, will be relatively cheep, and in case of an overdose the doctors know exactly how to get you back to life. For a long time I kept clean – but the city sucked me in, and I developed an addiction.

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The Saturday market at Boxhagener Platz is a vibrant place to get fresh food of all sorts: vegetables, spices, meat can be found here as well as beautiful cakes and cottage cheese ice cream – and of course, since Germany has a seaside, fresh fish is all over the market. The goods are coming from the farmers themselves, and the shopping experience lacks the pharmacy feel you get in Bio Company shops. Another point why food markets are great.

For the hungry who looks for something different than thai takeaways or döner kebab, this place is the best to be in a Saturday luchtime. The smell of grilled meat and sausages are coming from the direction of the caravans, which is also the place where I discovered the object of my addiction: the smoked mackerel.

These fish dishes are coming with horse radish and algae salad, and you can choose between a filet sandwich and a whole fish. The price is between 3.5 and 5.5 euros (after 4pm its usual to get discounts). Regardless of the format, the taste is heaven, and we could have it every day – but since the food market is only once a week, we are safe. Until we find another sugarman.

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Festive

Since the winter is over and the warm weather started to kick in, Berlin is on the way to become an amazing place to live. It’s a great turn of events.

A few months ago when I moved here, my first experiences in the city were nothing what I had in mind before. I was walking in the -15 Celsius cold, among the soviet buildings of Karl Marx Allee on the completely empty and dark street, looking for a room to rent, and could not figure out how I could think that this city is a friendly, open and civilized place – or even, a place to live at.

But who is the stupid, moving to a north European city in January.

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Since the end of February the days got longer, cycling started to actually feel good, and the discovery became better with every day. For the last few days the sun is out and there are no serious looking rainclouds on the sky – that, in Berlin, means: party.

Smoke is above all public parks, people are out with barbecues, and random open air gigs are being held: some bring dj sets and play fairly loud music, while everyone around starts to dance. Probably the world’s coolest but cheapest party: no entry fee, the beer is about one euro from the nearby spätis. A perfect match for the ‘arm aber sexy’ (poor but sexy) berliner.

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