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!
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.
You know I have a thing about retro so naturally in city'super/LOG-ON's Stationery department you will see some antique replicas. Here's a shot of one of our show cases with a Lars Magnus Ericsson 1892 "The Skeleton Type" or "Eiffel Tower" phone replica (I put a few other Eiffel Tower stuffs around it like a bookend, a card stand, a diary, a pack of Paris map magnets and a metal die cast desk deco. In case you wonder, the wine stopper and the little gold bar are USB memories).
Today we received a series of brand new German phone replicas we ordered but weren't sure if they could arrive before Xmas, what a surprise they did! The finishing looks far better than the prototype I saw before, it features a touch dial with a center redial button, exceptionally smart looking as a modernized phone. It is sold at HK$299. I had to literally beg the manufacturer to do business with me like 2 years ago, its worth everything and I'm so happy they are now in our stores, I hope our customers like them too.
To learn more about antique phones:
- Lars Magnus Ericsson the Swedish inventor
- The Skeleton Type (Dachshund)1892, L.M. Ericsson's very own design, from ericcsonhistory.com
- Ericsson AC100 Series "Skeletal" Desk Phone, collector Bob Estreich's detail account of history and various models. Interestingly according to Bob, both "Skeletal" and "Eiffel Tower" were names applied by collectors but not the real product names. The "Eiffel Tower" name was actually referring to another phone but got mixed up with the Ericsson one somewhere in time.
Ok, I got a whole year to make the final prizes of our dart competition within the company, quite many sketches and designs were done. Turned out, I executed the whole thing only on the day of our final match on 5th Dec 2009. Originally I intended to make leather dart cases which can be used as pass cases, you can imagine how many details were given up due to the last minute rush.
The fun part is the "UNRESTRICTED PASS" which the "bearer is authorized to produce ton8 or hattrick on demand unrestricted". Genuine machine readable QR codes and bar codes were included, when scanned names of the finalists can be decoded. The passes also included identity photos of the finalists.
It was real fun and I'm honored to make these prizes for the game. Seeing the winners using them on daily basis makes me happy. This also gave me more confidence on future leather craft projects I'm working on.
This is definitely one of our top 10 best selling stationery at city'super/LOG-ON, I'm afraid they will be out of stock soon before Xmas despite the fact that we already re-ordered them twice.
Converse pencases are always selling very good in our stores, but this is the first time they are in the form of sneakers instead of rectangular pouches. A lot of details have been put into this apparently simple pencase, including a genuine shoelace and extra 2 eyelets to help the shoe to breathe, embossed shoe bottom following the classic diamond shaped squares and crisscrossed lines, all capital ALL STAR letters and star logo on the heels, etc.
My colleague actually tried the Chucks pencases on her feet and they look great, except that they don't come in pairs so it looks a bit weird. If you insist, it is actually wearable, not that I would recommend you to unless you are in critical situations.
If you are a fan of Converse All Star "Chuck Taylor" canvas basketball shoe, be sure to check out the Facebook Chuck Taylor Converse fan page, the Chucks Connection site, the Flickr Converse World Domination! group. And who is Chuck Taylor?
Wouldn't it be more clean to inject ink into your fountain pen's ink reservoir using a syringe? I found it a more pleasant experience than simply using a piston or squeeze filler, besides this method fills up a lot more ink.
Sooner or later I will not be able to bear using this plastic needle, eBay has quite a lot of antique syringes up for auction, which suits my purpose. I know, some of you may be put off by the fact that those antique syringes were once used on humans, the negative energy may contaminate your ink. I certainly hope this effect can be demonstrated, it will amaze me if such negative energy shows up in hand writings.
Just wanna share with you some of the best selling Disney USB products in our stores. There's also a very popular Transformer USB memory and soon arriving a Transformer computer mouse.
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