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When thinking of print design, I always find it very important to take the medium where your “art” will be printed on into consideration. This holds especially true for business cards. They are sort of the second impression you give – and the more useful they are, the higher the chances that they will be a) kept and b) remembered when a job comes up.

One way to achive this is by giving your cards an added benefit, such as putting a calender on the reverse side. I doubt the usefulness of this. Not only does it waste valuable space, that you could use for unique information about your business. But I wonder if anyone actually uses them. And if they do – they might just put them up on the wall next to their desk. Thus hiding your business information. Point lost. more…

Have you been toying with the idea of getting yourself an iBook or, gasp, MacBookPro, but have put off the decision because your current Windows laptop still does the job? Let the following film be an inspiration for that you can have both – and do something for your body, too.

Good weekend, everybody!

Extras are the people in the background of a film that give life to a scene. A less-than-glamorous job (lots of waiting), they are usually directed by the assistant director.

Usually the extras are furnished with simple instructions like “Hey you in the grey shirt – walk from here to there. You with the cap, sit here, count til 10 and then get up. Don’t look into the camera!”. On some films, each extra gets his/her own role description, including a motivation.

In Wim Wender’s excellent film “Wings of Desire” you can see Peter Falk talk to extras.
And if you happen to see the Oscar nominated film “Elling”, you might even spot yours truly – on 3 occasions
Thanks to my iceland-based informer, I found out that the BBC has a new series named “Extras”, and here is a hilarious clip from it:

Hans pointed me to this awesome tour-de-force of how the web has changed & thereby changed us.

A transcript is available at the author’s site. Be sure to have a look at the Sandbox section. Boy, if I was 20 now, I might seriously consider studying there.

At Zimbabwe’s official telephone company, you can read that

TelOne’s Core Business is that of bring people together through providing appropriate, affordable and reliable telecommunications service in Zimbabwe

Their vision is truly gripping:

To be the model in the provision of appropriate, affordable and reliable telecommunication service on demand in Southern Africa

And be sure to have a look at the site’s footer

Copyright 2006 [Tel*One]. All rights reserved.
BODY>
Copyright 2006 [Tel*One]. All rights reserved.

And I love how they strive for utter customer satisfaction. Here an excerp from the faq:

Why do you take so long to offer service?
It is not that service delivery to our valued customers takes too long to offer. Each area is to be treated separately in order to see where the point of delay is coming from. Where existing infrastructure is available, service delivery should be done in the least possible time. However, our commitment is such that service provision should be completed within 3 days after the receipt of an A/N-for ordinary customers. Within 10 days after receipt of an A/N-for construction.

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Over at my favourite blog, I enjoyed todays recipe for stir fried chicken, á la North Korea

- Build a nuclear warhead
- Trade the nuclear warhead for a chicken (remember to ask for change)
- Kill the chicken
- Stir fry it

After I changed my wife´s private blog´s graphics, I felt like doing the same for mine. Looking back, I probably shouldn’t have, since spare time is not something I really have. As it turned out, my new design made it impossible to leave comments. So for now I am back to yet another theme, that will change a bit over the next few days (or weeks, or lifespans).

The whole family is struck down by a nasty virus, which not only impedes my blogging activity. So here just a little inspirational video:

Thanks to the thinking blog for that one.

I took my first photo when I was about 7 years old. Growing up in Germany of the 1970s, it was not a Kodak moment, but an Agfa moment. Anyway, the object in question was a cat on a field that apparently grasped my attention of my new Agfamatic kamera. Processing was expensive (when you had to pay it from your own pocket money), and I had another 23 pictures to take before I would get the film developed. So, it took a couple of weeks to find out that what I had seen had absolutely nothing to do with what the actual picture looked like. But still, it amazed me that it was possible to keep a moment frozen onto paper.

And that amazement never left me.

Later, when I started more seriously (as in: very interested hobbyist), I was lucky that the German Democratic Republic disappeared. With it it’s own film-making (and incredibly polluting) factory, ORWO. But between those two events, the west German mark bought incredible amounts of the ORWO black&white film. I think I must have purchased a 3-digit number of those rolls. I built myself a little robot, that would develop those film-rolls in batches of 4, thus giving me plenty of freedom to experiment.

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(Back from the sun. Since 100% of you requested that I should post some pictures from the trip, I will naturally oblige. Just not yet )

If you think that the USD 236 to switch to the iPhone is too much, have a look at this iPhone commercial.

…oh, and if you just cannot wait for the iPhone, you can buy yourself an almost-look-alike Prada phone. Less features. But hey!