I wrote this for the maxiwill blog, you can find the original post here.

Ask yourself what your problems are, not what your solution is

Designers provide a service, but in many ways, they are problem solvers within their field, just like you are within yours. Offer an expert your problem, and if they know how to, they’ll to solve it. Offer an expert your solution without making them aware of the problem, and they’ll either not solve it at all, or create more problems for you.

First off, know what you want to achieve, or what problem you have that needs to be solved. “I want a logo and a website” is not a marketing strategy, and nor is it demonstrating awareness of your business. “I’d like to raise brand awareness, and I think we should develop and expand our customer base” is more like it. “Customers don’t seem to respond to our marketing, How can we improve sales?” is also better than “We need a logo”. Decide what you want to achieve, identify your problem, and you’ll make your designer’s job a whole lot easier.

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This entry was written by xander, posted on March 10, 2010 at 6:21 pm, filed under Words and tagged business partnership, design, design techniques, entrepreneur, professional practice. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.

You know that saying, “don’t judge a book by it’s cover”? Unfortunately, people do. You never get a second chance to make a first impression. People judge others on their appearance first, and instinctively, someone’s face is the first thing you judge. You’re probably just as guilty of it as I am.

How about an analogy? If your business is a person, your logo is its face, and your brand identity is its clothing. People will judge you on it, and make their choices based upon it. Large businesses lose big if they make bad branding choices; Just look at the 2012 London Olympics, the Tropicana rebrand, or in the 90’s, “New” Coke.

Logo design is a specialised field of design. Successful logos should simultaneously communicate multiple business values, inform the consumer of the appropriate business sector, and should influence the target audience’s opinion. They should work as well in monochrome as they do in colour, and they should work as well on a business card or email footer as they do on a billboard. That’s a big ask. Get it wrong, and you can communicate all the wrong things. Get it right, get the consumer on your side, and the battle is all but won. (more…)

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This entry was written by xander, posted on January 14, 2010 at 4:09 pm, filed under Words and tagged branding, entrepreneur, graphic design, logo. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.

Photo by Frederick de la Faille, via Flickr.

Why your travel guide is not a bible.

Travel guides are often the first thing on a traveller’s list of “must-get” items. They are undoubtedly useful for finding your way in an unknown land, providing the weary traveller with everything from a list of recommended hostels and restaurants to contextual references and historical background. Used well, they can help a journey go smoothly, providing a swift, accessible insight into a location and leaving you more time to enjoy yourself. But used incorrectly, they can create disappointment and can even promote a lack of inclusion and provide a barrier to communication. (more…)

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This entry was written by xander, posted on January 7, 2010 at 6:27 am, filed under Words. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.

I’m willing to bet that the one factor slowing down your websites is image size. Optimizing your images can reduce your loading time, and if you have an image-heavy site, can reduce the bandwidth usage, potentially saving you cash on your hosting.

If you save images using Photoshop, then the File>Save for Web and Devices dialogue can save you a little memory with your images, but there’s only so much it can do.

Punypng is a free web service that promises great lossless reductions, (more so than smush.it even!) of up to 44% reduction…it supports .jpg, .gif, and .png, and dirty transparency. Check out their benchmarks for a side-by-side comparison.

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This entry was written by xander, posted on October 16, 2009 at 4:36 pm, filed under Words and tagged edit, image, load, web design. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.

If, like me, you own and love your Macbook Pro, then most likely you’re looking at installing Snow Leopard soon, if you haven’t already.

The sensible way to install Snow Leopard is to get Time Machine to back up all your files just before you upgrade to Snow Leopard, use the Install Disc to run a fresh install, and then restore your files using Time Machine. It takes half an hour longer than an upgrade, but it’s worth it, trust me.

Snow Leopard is a welcome new OS upgrade…It smoothly and silently supports 64bit processing, it’s been ported to Cocoa, and makes native apps launch and run like Usain Bolt.…and it frees up about 6GB from your harddrive.…not bad eh?

However…

I spent a few days wrestling with my Macbook after the upgrade, and it was obvious something was up…opening itunes took literally hours, forget about any Adobe software…and I could tell just from listening to my Macbook Pro that the processor was working overtime just to provide the Finder interface.

After some detective work through console and Terminal, I discovered that a preference list file called coreaudiod (path /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.audio.coreaudiod.plist ) was eating up virtual memory all the time. If your macbook is having a simlar problem, there’s a pretty simple solution: delete it, and restart your Macbook…problem solved!

Enjoy Snow Leopard!

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This entry was written by xander, posted on October 6, 2009 at 4:34 pm, filed under Words and tagged apple, hack, mac, macbook, snow leopard. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.

If you are truly lucky, at certain points in your life you will have moments of searingly beautiful realisation. These moments might happen once every ten years, or more, but they are brought on by a realisation of scale, a realisation of existence, or an acceptance of truth.

For me, they are often brought about by witnessing a fantastically special moment, often involving nature, and often involving a sense of the absolute honest scale of our home. Most recently, I was sitting on a plane from Rio de Janeiro to Salvador da Bahia, shortly after sunset, watching lightning storms dance across the sky all around the aeroplane, and seeing several shooting stars drifting across the sky. The sudden sense of proportion, not just in physical dimensions, but also in terms of sheer power, was awesome.

Those who wish to believe in something might give this moment a name attached to their beliefs; a religious experience, or a moment of enlightenment.

I choose to see these moments as a tiny ricochet of realisation, bouncing off the surface of what is real. We are trapped by our senses and physical being, obeying the boundaries of our capabilities, but every so often we can get a brief glimpse of life outside these senses, raw power and life energy.

Witnessing nature’s brute-iful (sic) power is incredible, and reminds me of just how diminutive and feeble we are, despite our technological advances/advantage. Experiencing the serendipitous nocturnal display from a “safe” distance accentuates this; I only had a long-distance insinuation of what those lightning storms were like, and even that was incredible.

Less than a week after I experienced this in-flight spectacle, Air France flight 447  was brought down by a similar event. Nature is gigantic, and powerful. It’s easy to forget, sitting in a cotton-wool country such as the UK, where only flu and adders threaten us.

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This entry was written by xander, posted on August 18, 2009 at 10:51 am, filed under Words and tagged air france flight 447, awesome, brazil, flight, lightning, rio de janeiro, salvador. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.

Contrasts

It´s a cliché, but Rio (and Brasil) really is a city of contrasts. One minute you will be surrounded by rich suits, and take fourty steps in a specific direction you can trip over someone sleeping on the street, with literally nothing to their name. One minute you can be surrounded by massive polished marble skyscrapers, the next, seeing people living in wooden shacks smaller and more rickety than your garden shed, perches precariously on a hillside, surrounded by jungle. The avocados are the size of melons (I shit you not) but coffees are smaller than even italian espressos.

The most fantastic of these contrasts (more of a contradiction actually) is deep-fried sushi in batter, something that surely should never have existed.

Beaches

The beaches here are no less part of the city than the metro or the park; lives are lived here, and it is a space that is used for much; vendors walk past sun-worshippers, selling everything; suncream, kites, prawns, fried cheese, drinks, biscuits, jewellery, cloths, clothes, hat s, fruit, etc. They all have their own mantra, stating the sum of their wares, sometimes with such a unique style as to set them apart from their contemporaries; I´m talking about the pineapple man, with a wide, flat basket of abacaxi (pineapple) balances on his head, bright yellow washing up gloves on his hands, who sneaks up on unsuspecting sunbathing ladies and shocks them awake with a yell, brandishing a half pineapple at them, smiling all the while. The beach is used for surfing, bodyboarding, bodysurfing, volleyball, football, futevolei (volleyball with everything but your hands) peteka (think badminton with a feathery ufo and no rackets or net), running, acrobatics, and lazing about. Some homeless guys sleep under palm trees on the beach, pissing behind them, weaving bracelets to sell and collecting empty coke cans to sell for scrap. The beach sustains all walks of life just as sufficiently as any neighborhood, the difference being the lack of buildings.

Capoeira

Capoeira in Rio is hard to find, but not inaccessible– you have to look for it nonetheless, it´s not quite as prominent as I imagined, here at least. Training is held in buildings just on the edges of favelas, just within the boundaries of society, maintaining its history of social periphery. The level of game is higher than the UK, they play closer (in general) than we do, and are more efficient and swift with well-placed kicks and sweeps; it seems that we play to miss slightly, whereas they play to hit, and will only pull their kicks at the last minute, if at all. Training in the heat is hard, but emphasis is placed on music just as much as the game, which is refreshing. My girlfriend and myself have been writing down as many sequences trained as we can remember.

I don´t want to use this blog as a ‘this is what I’ve done´ space, but I have little time to formulate opinions properly, and my time is spent experiencing, assessing levels of safety or otherwise, planning, and most of all, enjoying and relaxing. I’ll try and post some photos up when I get a minute, but they are still on me camera right now.

Much love to you all, be good now,

Xander

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This entry was written by xander, posted on May 1, 2009 at 9:15 pm, filed under Words and tagged brazil, contrast, south america, travel. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.

There´s something about being in motion, about seeing new things, experiencing new places, that is a fantastically enriching shock to the system. All your senses work overtime, assessing the alien environment. It´s not just the physical differences in location that is apparent, not just the temperature, climate, or immediate environment. It´s the new sounds, lingual, animal, or mechanical. It´s the rich, fullsome smells, a jumble of fumes muddled together by the humidity and heat. It´s also the feel of a place, that indescribable sense of atmosphere that is a heady mix of every potential possiblity, fed into one ripe location, at one point in time.

Travelling also gives you a sense of yourself, what you truly need, what you simply require, what you possess through a need to consume and own, rather than simply what keeps you going. It gives you a sense of what you use most, what you don´t need at all.

Seeing street kids in Rio, living truly hand-to-mouth, with no thought for the future, no sense of planning ahead or a potential for anything other than the immediate need that the present demands, brings this home to you with a thud. They live only for the now, and as a result, they are disparate, hopeless, angry, and confused.

A future is a true luxury.

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This entry was written by xander, posted on April 27, 2009 at 10:22 pm, filed under Words and tagged movement, opinion, pop-up philosophy, travel. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.