The Amazon Kindle is starting to become a new and exciting trend as a replacement to books and the traditional newspapers.
For those of us who still like to feel and touch newspapers and books this is sad to see. However, the Kindle is a cleaner, environmentally friendlier option that also eliminates the clutter of books. For our generation and our parent’s generation having bookcases of books, magazines, encyclopedia britannica and journals was something you cherished and even bragged about; nowadays the clutter of these material things is increasingly becoming less within the younger generations.
Thou it is hard for me to say lets embrace the Kindle as this is the sign of things to come in our digital age.
My road trip lead me to Rotorua for the annual tough guy and girl challenge.
The full course is 12 kilometres (7.5 miles), (two 6km laps),and is based on an “Army type obstacle course”. You can run, walk, push, crawl or climb through a variety of natural and man made obstacles.
The course includes water trails, a spiders web net climb, mud slide, crawl under barbed wire, a tricky wire rope bridge, unbelievable native bush trails, paddock running, swamp crossing and more mud. The course has been designed for you to complete and have one of the most memorable experiences of your life.
Well it certainly lives up to the description, one of the guys managed to re-engineer his bottom on a rock sliding down a mud bank, the rest of us were finding mud traces for days and nursing very sore legs.
Sorry about the music, it was a you tube auto selection.
Being creative types we understand the importance of knowing how get the best from yourself, how to ween out the best ideas and think clearly. The Economist has launched an interesting online campaign in Europe called the thinking space initiative which explores how it’s readers get their ideas and allows you to submit your own ‘thinking space’. The site showcases the thinking space of a diverse group of people from business strategists to musicians, and it looks pretty fine too…
It’s been a while since I have written a post so it has forced me to reflect on what’s new in my life since my last blog. COLOUR (or color, for our US readers). For the last couple of months I have taken up a Watercolour Painting Class on a Friday morning (apparently this is what ladies do with their spare time), which has proven to be a very interesting process.
Firstly, I’m a complete novice and quickly learning that there are two masters involved with watercolour painting, you and the paper. I’m so used to working on a computer and having complete control over the work that I produce. Working with a medium where the whim of the paper, paint and water can take the work in unexpected directions is very hard to get used to but also very refreshing. Imagine working on an advertisement and then at a seemingly random moment the computer decided to add some lorem ipsum and flip the work sideways and slip down the page! Sometimes the mistakes are happy ones.
Maybe by next blog I might be brave enough to post some examples of my work but at this point please enjoy these artists.
Creative folk like us often enjoy dabbling in various creative pursuits. Art, painting, photography and illustration are quite popular among the graphic design sect, and they are skills that come in handy in our line of work. Creating things can be a fulfilling hobby. Crafting has undergone a revival in the past few years, with knitting becoming cool, no longer just something your granny does. Celebrities have taken it up and stitch ‘n’ bitch groups become popular.
In New Zealand the indie craft scene is flourishing, with a focus on ‘upcycling’ and making something new out of something old. Recently, Craft 2.0 was held in Christchurch and introduced me to this new scene. At the same time I discovered felt… like something different, an online shop for people to buy and sell handmade goods. It’s full of unique, interesting and downright gorgeous creations. World Sweet World is a new magazine that has started up to cater to this burgeoning market, and is gaining quite a following.
All in all, some great outlets and inspiration to help our creative talent flourish.
They (we) constantly bust their (our) brains over which road is the road less traveled and why. Oftentimes, what makes madmen and women so damn mad is that while the crossroad torments us, there’s no other place we’d rather be.
The reason why is because we know that creation for us, is far more progressive than duplication. We know that while experience is massively important, it rarely tells us what to do. We should only give experience an extremely limited tip of the hat so that it merely informs us as to what to watch out for. To the creativity minded, which is apparent in all functioning facets of TimeZoneOne, merely existing on experience is like driving on tracks down the same road-over and over and over and over again. You’ll get there, you’ll be safe. You’ll be sound. And you’ll be bored.
Which brings me to something not at all boring: Madmen.
Madmen is a true crossroads drama in that its purpose is to entertain, delight, and inform the world of our business through fresh faces, fashion and film. It dares to be different. It dares to sidestep the status quo. It depicts those creative spirits who, with confidence, bravado, cigarettes, booze, and unbridled creativity in a world of unbridled new media (television, at the time) took the roads less traveled and won-big.
This show is a very well done reflection of real Madmen and Madwomen. Madness with real names-George Lois, Jerry Della Famina, Mary Wells, Sir Frank Lowe, and the Cohen Brothers of advertising, Saatchi and his younger brother Saatchi. The maddest of the mad men who set out to break the rules for these crazy, rule breaking bastards was Bill Bernbach.
The attached clip is a bit of work he lead that, like Robert Johnson, changed the way we do things today.
You”ll see the Levy’s Rye Bread work in this clip.
The line he created is “You don’t have to be Jewish to love Levy’s”.
Bernbach was Jewish. He made himself a sandwich of corn beef on two slices of Levy’s and wrote the line, “You don’t have to be Jewish to love Levy’s…because no Jew would ever eat this shit”.
He said the most creative thing we can do is tell the truth about what you’re trying to sell. If you can’t tell the truth, at least tell a half truth.
Its that time of year again when local artists and designers get to show us the best way to wear and model everything from t-bags, insulation pipe, and feathers to fiber optics and plastic bags. The annual wearable art extravaganza originally began in Nelson, New Zealand and has grown from strength to strength. It is hard to describe the award ceremony, a montage of theater, dance, color, movement and art, a theatrical spectacular.
After 14 hemisphere-hopping winters in a row Alex Herbert fell in love with the Canterbury club fields and made Lyttelton, New Zealand his home.
He started a repair workshop, the Ski & Board Surgery, in central Christchurch in 1999 and it quickly became the city’s busiest workshop.
When fat skis appeared in the late 1990s, Alex wanted them bad, but they were scarce. Eventually, he took matters into his own hands and decided to make them himself. Taking his knowledge from 14 years at the tuning bench, Alex set to work. The first step was to take his favourite pair of skis and cut them into 86 pieces to see what was inside.
The first press was made from two pieces of rolled steel sandwiched together with car jacks. Though the start was rough, the aim had always been to make the highest quality skis possible. Alex was convinced skis could be better, stronger, more durable. He wasn’t willing to put his name to them unless they were the best ski he could imagine.
And so he experimented until he got it right. The first ski was good, ski-able and strong. The hard part wasn’t making a ski… it was making a great ski. That took three more years.
Kingswood Skis hit the market in June 2005 but the search for perfection continues. In 2007, the topsheets were improved, new shapes added and old ones tweaked.
Alex runs the company with his wife Kris. Alex hangs out in his big ski factory, rides his skateboard from one end to the other and makes all the skis. Kris does pretty much everything else. Kris says it’s her job to take Alex’s ideas about ski making and their combined ideas about life in general and translate that into running a business. Alex says he’s lucky to have her.
