Archive for 'Design'

Design Kingdom presents: FlashQuest 16th Jan 2010

Apologies, I should’ve blogged this earlier.

Design Kingdom presents: FlashQuest

Design Kingdom presents: FlashQuest
Date: 16th Jan 2010
Time: 10am-3pm
Fee:20,000/=

Only 7 spots left. Book Now.

FlashQuest is a series of Adobe Flash training, discussion and learning sessions, covering animation, interactivity and programming. Each session is unique and will have a specific theme or target project and will last 4 hours long, with a Q&A session at the end.

The Project: Creating an Interactive Portfolio CD with Adobe Flash

The session on 16th January 2010 will focus on interactivity with Adobe Flash and our goal will be to create an Interactive CD based portfolio.

The training will be carried out by Solomon King, founder of Elemental Edge and Node Six, and who has very many years of Flash animation under his belt.

Details and Booking here.

On Design Kingdom – Leo Burnett, “When to take my name off the door”

If I had to choose the two greatest speeches I’ve been priviledged to read, it would be a tie between Steve Jobs’ Stanford Commencement Speech and Leo Burnett’s “When to take my name off the door” speech.

I have talked about Steve Jobs’ speech before, but had always forgotten to talk about Leo Burnett.

This morning I was going through Facebook and saw a friend’s status message that had another great quote by Leo Burnett, and I remembered that I badly needed to share this speech.

However, since it’s more pertinent to creatives/designers/advertising agencies, I posted it over at Design Kingdom. But I would recommend you read it, even if you’re not in the creative/advertising industry. He may be talking to advertising agencies, but the wisdom applies to all facets of life (in context, of course).

Enjoy.

Offtopic:

“I have always taken the attitude that no account is a ‘problem account’ but that all accounts have important problems attached to them – that you can waste more time and burn up more nervous energy by fighting a problem than by taking a positive attitude and solving it.” - Leo Burnett

Download the Unknown Soldier, Volume 1 – Haunted House

Unknown Soldier

Tumwijuke ( Ugandan Insomniac ) blogged about it a while earlier, and it’s been making a few waves. And right now, I just discovered from @whiteafrican that Vertigo, the DC Comics subsidiary is making the first Volume first Issue in Volume One ( Haunted House ) downloadable. Yup, it’s free, and yes, it is legit. Get your copy here. ( 20MB Download)

I’m too excited but dashing out for a meet so I can’t download it right now, but let me know what you guys think!

For a synopsis:

Welcome to Northern Uganda. In 2002, it’s a place where tourists are hacked to death with machetes, 12-year-olds with AK-47s wage war, and celebrities futilely try to get people to care. Moses Lwanga is a pacifist doctor caught at the center of this. But when his life is threatened, Moses suddenly realizes he knows how to kill all too well. What is this voice telling him the only way to fix what’s wrong with the country is by slaughtering those responsible? And what is Moses’ connection to past bandage-wrapped warrior?

you. yes you. you’re a wuss.

Yes. You are.

Allow me to explain.

First, the general description of a wuss is; “a person who is physically weak and ineffectual”. It has been used more recently however, to derogatorily  describe a man who is weak, ineffectual, effeminate and wishy-washy, especially when it comes to the ladies.

Some friends and I have a long running joke about wusses, sometimes even dissing ourselves in the process. Don’t sweat it, it’s a guy thing.

So, couple of days back, at the week-long peak of this joke, we’re in an informal meeting discussing a way forward on some project and because someone was being indecisive about a certain action, we jokingly called him a wuss. We laughed it off and eventually forged a way forward.

That night however, those same words came back to torment me during my quiet moment of self-reflection, and the reality hit me hard;

I realised that I was being a (business) wuss in so many ways.

It was a very painful blow to the gut.
Read more

Design Kingdom v2 is finally here!

design kingdom

Help us spread the good news! http:/www.designkingdom.ug

And now, I need to head over to Sanyu FM. I’m appearing on the Breakfast Show today at 7am. Tune in give some moral support, will ya?

Peace.

Tanzania Mania – a prelude

So, from Monday to Wednesday, I was kinda all over Tanzania. Route was Entebbe to Nairobi to Dar es Salaam to Mwanza to Bukoba to Mutukula and back to our lovely country.

I took thousands of pics. Yeah. Thousands. That’s how I get when I lay my hands on a camera. This time I was privileged to travel with a Nikon D80. Awesome machine. It was my second proper exposure to the finer workings of a DSLR, over three days. My first exposure was just a few hours, in which I was too scared to mess up the person’s settings.

But, let me not bore you. I have a few teaser pics. I have tweaked in a little Photoshop magic. I can’t release the rest till the project is complete, which will be next week, so a little patience, toute le monde, s’il vous plait.

Without further ado…

This view is just awesome!

Mount Kilimanjaro. 'nuff said.

This is a beautiful island.

Dar es Salaam Port, as seen from the Control Tower

on making mistakes

The year is 2003. Month, June. Day, 6th. Time, 9:01.

I’m sitting at my desk. Staring at the computer.

I log on to True African, and send myself the following SMS. Yes, I sent myself an SMS. No, I wasn’t mad.

No, I wasn’t.

The SMS says:

“Over six months I have called this place home.
And so it ends.
The future beckons.
Shall we proceed?
After all, it is only Destiny

I still have the SMS to this day.

That day was the last day of formal employment for me. I was stepping out into the brave new world of being self-employed. You know, doing my own thing.

I was 20. I had fulfilled my dream of of owning my own company by 21. And I had beaten it by a solid year.
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use a condom, block evil sperm, like Bin Laden

An interesting ad campaign for Doc Morris Pharmacies. The theme? Use a condom and block potential evil sperm, like Hitler or Osama Bin Laden or Mao Zedong.

Ironically, the ads are from Germany. See more details here and more images here.

Some people are already looking at the opposite view. One commenter says:

“Of course, equally logically, using a condom also precludes the birth of the next Bach, Goethe, or Einstein, since, as far as I know, they don’t block only evil sperm.”

Advertising genius or overkill?

What’s your take?

Rogue FM: Simon and Garfunkel – Bridge Over Troubled Water

Offtopic:

The most powerful element in advertising is the truth.
- William Bernbach

Doing business without advertising is like winking at a girl in the dark.  You know what you are doing, but nobody else does.
-Steuart Henderson Britt

photography – fooling around with a canon digital rebel

I love photography, y’all know that. And the Canon Digital Rebel range is very high on the list of cameras I’d like to own, for three reasons; they sound cool, they are actually very brilliant DSLRs and they are affordable, especially the older models.

As luck would have it, last week, for a few hours, I got a chance to play with a Canon Digital Rebel XT. I couldn’t fool around much with ISO settings and light metering and whatnot because the owner was heading for a wedding to take photos and I didn’t want to mess up anything (seeing as he had no idea what I was talking about, life would probably get a lot more complex for him if I changed anything.)

However, I promptly switched to manual focus and began checking out what it could do.

The Settings
First, for those interested, I shot using the body lens, 18-55mm, no external lenses. Most shots were 25-50mm though. ISO was at 800. Shutter speed and exposure were on auto, and seemed to oscillate between 1/60s and 1/200s.

The Photos.

This is my first time with an DSLR, heck, it’s my first time with anything other than a point and shoot, so please be gentle.

Also, my human subjects are not too ecstatic about being put on the internet, so I have to leave shots with people out. And lastly, I took hundreds of photos. I’ve simply picked out some of the nicest ones. They will get better with time, I can promise you that.

So here we go.


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mining twitter links: a photo project and the world as 100 people

I love Twitter for one thing. The links that the people you follow embed in their tweets. Depending on who you follow, you can discover a wealth of information from the link.

I’ll share two that I discovered today.

1. We’re all gonna die – 100 Meters of Existence
A photography project by Simon Høgsberg


From the website, “Shot over the course of 20 days from the same spot on a railroad bridge in Warscahuer Strasse in Berlin, Summer 2007.”

I have never seen a kaleidoscope of expression/emotion/personalities as vibrant as this. Not to mention the photography being brilliant! I think the most fascinating thing about the project was that almost no one knew the photographer was taking their photos. From the father carrying his little child to the couple that has identical bandages over the right eye… I found the entire project very fascinating.
See for yourself.

2. The Miniature Earth
A short video that highlights the plight of the world’s underprivileged in very simple terms.


From the website, “If we could turn the population of the earth into a small community of 100 people, keeping the same proportions we have today, it would be something like this…”

The facts are rather shocking when brought down to a simpler level like this. Facts like out of the 100, 9 would be disabled, 43 would live without basic sanitation, and 6 people would own 59% of the wealth and get this, only 3 would have an internet connection! Let’s just say it’s a touching piece, and makes you realise how much you take for granted.
Check out the video.

Rogue FM: James Carrington – Ache

Offtopic:

Poverty sits by the cradle of all our great men and rocks all of them to manhood.
- Heinrich Heine

Seldom do people discern
Eloquence under a threadbare cloak.
- Juvenal

If the misery of the poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin.
- Charles Darwin