Archive for August, 2010
If you care about public transport in the city of Cape Town – here’s your chance to make a contribution
Posted on 17. Aug, 2010 by Jonathan Cherry.
Nice bus
If you believe that Cape Town deserves a properly working public transport network and have a few ideas of how the city can make it financially and logistically viable, then speak up. We have a few strong ideas regarding promoting, pricing and access to the MyCiti bus network that we’re going to be sending the powers that be – and you can too.
Here is the proposed business plan – that you can study in more detail.
Comments must be posted to Mike Marsden, Executive Director: Transport, Roads and Major Projects, City of Cape Town, P O Box 298, Cape Town 8000, or faxed to 021 400 5697 or e-mailed to beverley.ball@capetown.gov.za by no later than Tuesday 31 August 2010.
Here’s your chance to get involved and make Cape Town an even better city.
[...and thanks to Smart About What for the info]
The FIFA 2014 Brazil World Cup logo
Posted on 17. Aug, 2010 by Jonathan Cherry.
Designed by an agency called Africa
If you haven’t seen it yet, here is the new FIFA World Cup Brazil logo. Nice – very nice.
Rebranding a plane: Virgin Atlantic livery time-lapse video
Posted on 17. Aug, 2010 by Jonathan Cherry.
Total time for this mammoth paint job is four days.
Red Bull Airdrop
Posted on 17. Aug, 2010 by Jonathan Cherry.
Red Bull made a welcome Mini Drop at the end of the Cape Storm / Salomon Trail Series in Kleinmond this weekend, which was very welcome. But you gotta dig this airdrop idea that they did at what looks like an American university. A fantasy idea manifesting itself in reality.
Just can’t believe how orderly these students are – just taking one or two cans each.
Cadbury’s offers a moment of joy with a flying ostrich
Posted on 16. Aug, 2010 by Jonathan Cherry.
Remember the 2007 Cadbury’s drumming gorilla [Phil Collins 'In the air tonight'] ad that took the world by storm? Well there is a new moment of joy – this time featuring an ostrich [yes it's South African] jumping out of the back of a plane i.e. flying.
Glad they didn’t make to ostrich look real – otherwise the blue-rinse brigade would be all over this one.
Amstel Lager – hot or not?
Posted on 16. Aug, 2010 by Jonathan Cherry.
On more than one occasion this weekend – we overheard conversations that went something like this:
Guy 1: ‘Hey man – what beer do you want? Amstel or something else?’
Guy 2: ‘Nah – f*&k Amstel. Since they left us I’ve turned to Marzen Gold / Peroni / Windhoek / Heineken and Amstel tastes like sh*t these days in anycase’
Perhaps if we’d heard the comment once we would have assumed it to be an individual point of view, but in two very separate occasions the feelings against the Amstel brand were strongly negative and made loudly enough to almost have been regarded at a public announcement.
Not being regular Amstel drinkers the taste change of the beverage has gone completely over our heads, but the tangible change in attitude towards a brand that at one time was almost as endearing to the South African public as Mrs Balls and a Toyota Hi lux bakkie is interesting. Personally our feeling towards Amstel Lager is neutral. It seems like a nice enough beverage to drink on occasion. So we were never a candidate for a love / hate kinda feeling towards it now.
Our take on it is - that like cigarettes and rugby teams, your choice in beer brand defines your personal social tribe [obviously taste has a bit to do with it too]. If the brand that formed the glue or social fabric of that tribe turns its back on those people [even for a very short time] – it’s a long hard road back [if ever] to winning them over again. They’ve moved on and had World Cups and braais and Tri-nations disappointments with Mr. Windhoek and Mr. Heineken.
It’s telling how people see brands as friends, while business folk see brands as money – and all too often, friends and money don’t mix to well. It’ll be intriguing to see if the sentiment changes over time.
So now you need to select a typeface – this is where it gets tricky
Posted on 16. Aug, 2010 by Jonathan Cherry.
Whilst sipping on some Jack Daniel’s laced coffee yesterday morning directly after completing an excellent power trail run in Kleinmond – we noticed, out of the corner of one eye, that the bottle has no fewer than at least a hundred thousand different typefaces plastered all over it.
Morning!
Perhaps the resaon is that makers of Jack Daniel’s don’t allow designers to tinker with the look of the label without having first had a couple of shots of the golden fluid. Hence the confusion, or maybe that just don’t give a damn about silly design rules and daft stuff like that. All the same – a courtesy glance at this handy typeface selector [hit the image above for a larger version] may help going forward.
Meet Precious – the bike with a brain
Posted on 12. Aug, 2010 by Jonathan Cherry.
Right now – an intelligent bicycle is being ridden across America [from coast to coast] to raise money and awareness for the Livestrong Foundation.
Precious [the name of the bike] is a highly technical, sensor-laden, Tweet emitting machine that you can follow in real time here.
Hello my Precious
The company that built the bike have created a device that takes readings from various sensors, including temperature, humidity, grade, speed, pedal rotation, direction and GPS, and sends the results via text to the company’s servers, passing through the Twitter API along the way to parse the text messages.
The system spits out a tweet automatically, but McCrae [the bike's human rider] can also reach out to followers with the push of a button on her handlebars. [via]
Such a radical idea. We’ll be keeping track of Precious for sure. Love the way the project layers all the tech to bring the experience of riding across America to a web audience. Armchair travel at its best.
Oil spills are very hot right now
Posted on 12. Aug, 2010 by Jonathan Cherry.
Italian Vogue ran out of ideas for how they were going to shoot the August 2010 fashion spread – so while watching CNN they came up with the brilliant idea of draping the models in fake oil, complete with black pelican feathers and fabric that looks like muck.
BP turns to fashion
People are upset, the models are dirty and everyone is getting a copy of Vogue Italia to show their friends. [Well - it's not like they were going to put their footballers on the cover, so what other choice did they have?]
Next month we’ll be back to Katy Perry walking around a land of sugary treats and conspiring to lick something sweet with Snoop Dogg and we’ll all breathe a collective sigh of relief again, knowing that the world is still wholesome, virginal and pure.
Bicycle film festival trailer vs Top Gear’s latest Bugatti Veyron review
Posted on 11. Aug, 2010 by Jonathan Cherry.
If there’s one thing we wish Cape Town had less of, it’s cars. And it would be nice if we were also part of the global bicycle film festival.
Now in its tenth year the festival is held in 37 cities worldwide. 300,000 people are expected to attend this year.
Oh well – until then…we’ll just have to save up to get our mitts on the world’s best car instead.
Tough choice.
