Morten Schroder of Van Houtte Coffee knows something about being a sustainability leader.

In fact, Van Houtte has a long, proud history of adopting sustainability measures, even before a clear ROI matrix has been established. (The latest example is Van Houtte’s implementation of Renewable Natural Gas, a product I helped position and market).

“We believe in making decisions based on the bottom line, of course. But we also have a very clear agenda to reduce greenhouse gas emissions” said Schroder. “What surprised us is that our sustainability decisions – without fail – have all paid off financially. Even when they were based on investing in new ideas.”

Schroder is not the only trailblazer reaping the rewards of acting on ideals.

As reported recently in Sustainable Brands, new research on the world’s 50 fastest growing brands found a cause-and-effect relationship between a brand’s ability to serve a higher purpose and its financial performance.

The research, from Millward Brown and Jim Stengel, cited companies like Method, Seventh Generation and Stonyfield Farm. All companies that have elevated ethics and sustainability to leading operating principles.

The study forms the backbone of Stengel’s book GROW: How Ideals Power Growth and Profit at the World’s Greatest Companies.

So are ideals the next brand differentiator? Is acting ethically the best way to engage jaded consumers? Or does it all come down to common sense?

A Practical, Successful Shift: B Corp

B Corp gained prominence a few years ago as a business sustainability certification program.

One of the things that made B Corp different was, in hindsight, incredible common sense. The program provided a template for companies to incorporate longer term payback – often key to sustainability initiatives – right into their corporate charter.

This simple, yet profound shift away from short term ROI made it possible for companies to invest in ethical, sustainable improvements without the fear of having their programs axed for lack of short term payback.

On Friday, February 3rd, B Corp announced it had over 500 US companies on board, and had just signed up its first 39 Canadian companies. A success that Houston Peschl of DIRTT, one of the largest Canadian corporations to sign on, attributes to finding a common sense way to validate ethical behavior. As Peschl says, “DIRTT understands that it requires a different approach to be successful, the old business practices of manufacturing are archaic. Through innovative product design, amazing work force culture, and revolutionizing how to manufacture environmentally friendly products within a local economy, B Corp allows us to capture many of the intangibles of our unique approach and show the world what we are doing to change manufacturing in North America.”

Futureproof Brand Lesson: Reconsider The Business Model

If there’s one thing to be learned from Van Houtte Coffee and B Corp, it’s that the old business model for measuring performance needs to be tweaked.

Quarterly returns are fine. But the consistent long term gains seen from sustainability measures – gains like customer loyalty, staff motivation and improved efficiency as energy use is reduced – take time to manifest.

It can be likened to the returns on brand investment. Brand building is a slow process, but accepted as invaluable to companies.

While we’re looking at the business model, attention needs to be paid to the ROI measures used. New, exciting sustainability initiatives often have hidden benefits, or hard to measure benefits. For example, the Renewable Natural Gas program that I worked on offered incredible marketing benefits that easily outweighed the operational costs – but those marketing benefits needed to be brought into the ROI measurement before the business case made sense.

Finally, if you want to build a futureproof brand, you need to lead. That said, your leadership needs to be based on strong insights into market trends and consumer demands. As Henry Ford and Steve Jobs understood, leaders can create products that people need – even before people know they need them.

 Original Article

Just ask Morten Schroder or B Corp.

Marc Stoiber is a creative director who helps clients build resilient, futureproof brands. He previously was head of green innovation at Maddock Douglas, a leading US innovation firm; president and founder of Change, a green brand agency; national creative director at Grey Advertising; and creative Director at DDB. His passion lies at the intersection of green, brand, and innovation. He speaks on the topic of brands and innovation from coast to coast, and writes on the subject for journals that include Fast Company, Huffington Post, GreenBiz and Sustainable Life Media
[Read more about Marc Stoiber]

Looks like Apple is on the verge of capturing yet another lucrative market, and changing education as we know it… Or are they?

On Jan 19th, Apple made a huge announcement: iBooks 2 would “reinvent” the way students learn by offering interactive textbooks, and iBooks Author would make it easy for anyone, even without programming skills, to create those books.

READ MORE: The Earth – and Its Average Inhabitant – at 7 Billion People (Infographic)

These new iBook textbooks would not only offer things traditional textbooks cannot, like embedded video, audio, and interactive graphics, but they would also be much less expensive than textbooks are today—with an average price of around $15, as opposed to the current average $75 cost many students pay now.

But are iBooks really cheaper? Especially after you add in the cost of a $400 iPad. So the folks who help people become teachers at Online Teaching Degree decided to crunch a few of the numbers, and see if change is truly coming. The results may not be as revolutionary as you think…

READ MORE: Common Myths Busted by the Other Myth Busters

Image Source

The Arkitypo project came about when one of our clients, Ravensbourne, asked if we were interested in developing a research project to test and showcase the in-house 3d prototyping skills and technology at their site in Greenwich.

We suggested they do something typographic – just the briefest period of research revealed very few examples of prototyping merged with graphic design. So we set ourselves the brief to develop a 3d alphabet of alphabets. Each letterform is different, each in turn interprets its own alphabet.

For each letter we carried out extensive research, made drawings, built maquettes and did simple 3d visuals on our machines, before handing the ideas over to Ravensbourne’s team.

There was a period of ‘virtual proofing’ where we examined the ideas as rendered files, and when all parties were happy, we began the printing (which for some letters took as long as eight hours). Some of the ideas worked straight away, some needed refining. Some fell apart, some were perfect, but after about six months solid work by December last year the ‘alphabet’ was ready for the photography you see here.

Akzidenz Grotesk (shown above)
Originally designed in 1896, and forerunner to Helvetica, Akzidenz was part of a family of early sans-serifs called ‘grotesques’. It comes in a range of weights and styles: for this design a condensed weight is ‘fractalised’, turning a grotesque into a thing of beauty.

Bodoni
Baskerville and Bodoni are usually judged as two separate typefaces, but Giambattista Bodoni modelled his famous font on John Baskerville’s, at first. The key difference is that the thicks and thins are in turn thicker, and thinner.

Courier
Courier was originally commissioned for 1950s IBM typewriters, but soon became the standard font throughout the then-emerging industry. As a nod to the torturous days of jammed machinery, this ‘C’ is built from a small forest of typewriter keys.

DIN
DIN is the acronym of Deutsches Institut für Normung. Type design DIN 1451 was selected in 1936 as the standard German typeface across areas such as engineering, technology and traffic signs. As its popularity grows internationally, it has become one of the key symbols of cities and technology across the world.

Engravers
This was typical of a style of font originally designed for engraving into metals, especially gold and silver.

Fraktur
This classic ‘blackletter’ style of fonts is umbilically linked to Germany’s history, being the predominant style for centuries in pre-war Germany. For most of the 20th century it proved controversial, eventually being banned by the Nazis in 1941. Post-war adoption of sans-serif typefaces effectively killed it off as the nation’s style of script.

Gill Sans
This is the famous lowercase ‘g’ from Eric Gill’s 1933 typeface, Gill Sans. He is quoted as saying, “A pair of spectacles is rather like a ‘g’; I will make a ‘g’ rather like a pair of spectacles.”

Helvetica
Originally designed in 1957 as Neue Haas Grotesk, its 1960 version was renamed Helvetica. Given that its name was based on ‘Helvetia’ (Latin for Switzerland) it was no surprise that it became the vanguard of the Swiss style, and the typeface of choice for corporations across the world for the last fifty years.

Industria
Originally designed for The Face in 1984 by Neville Brody, Industria was released publically as a font in 1989. It has a mechanical structure of straight strokes, rounded corners and square inner spaces that refer back to Art Deco and design pioneers such as Ladislav Sutnar.

Johnston
This face is one of the earliest 20th century sans-serif typefaces, designed for London Transport by Edward Johnston in 1916. Originally called ‘Underground’, we now know it as Johnston, and it remains in use a century later. It was a key influence on Gill Sans and has several unique features, including its diagonal square dots.

Kabel
Released in 1927, Kabel was a geometric sans-serif typeface that was named in honour of the then newly completed transatlantic telephone cable.

Lubalin Graph
Herb Lubalin designed this font by initially basing it on its predecessor, Avant Garde. It filled a need for a slab-serif alphabet for the emerging phototypesetting industry.

Machine
This infamous ITC typeface of the seventies took its inspiration from the American Midwest a century before. Now a classically brutal font perfect for all things industrial, it is interpreted here with a system of interlocking cogs.

New Alphabet
This typeface was a radical experimental font proposed by Dutch design legend Wim Crouwel in 1967. He simplified characters down to their absolute minimum, and only utilised vertical, horizontal or 45-degree strokes.

OCR-A
One of the original computer fonts, OCR became omnipresent in banking and on cheques. It was often printed in magnetic ink and was widely adopted in industry, despite the fact that many of its letterforms (designed to be uniquely different) were in fact uniquely odd.

Perpetua
Another Eric Gill font from the 1920s, Perpetua hints at Gill’s skill as a calligrapher and stone-cutter, especially in its capitals. Here it is set to perpetuate in an endless, Möbius strip of uppercase letters.

Quadrate
Many of the characters within this grid-based typeface from 2002 have the impression of having 3D form whilst only 2D. So this adaptation imagines what its 3D shape ‘could’ have been.

Retina
This typeface began as a typeface for the sections of the The Wall Street Journal printed in very small sizes. At large sizes it seems to feature crude ‘notches’ cut into the letterforms but these are there to compensate for the way blobs of ink blur type at tiny sizes.

Serifa
Adrian Frutiger designed Serifa in 1966. Technically a ‘slab-serif’ design, Frutiger based his first designs on his well known sans-serif font, Univers, and simply added the serifs.

Trajan
This was a 1989 adaptation of the famous Roman capitals inscribed on the base of Trajan’s Column in Rome. These letterforms have been influential for centuries, but this was the first design to directly emulate the carvings. The column itself can be climbed via an internal spiral staircase.

Univers
This typeface family was famous for its broad appeal and was one of the first attempts to create a classification across its many weights, widths and styles. Since its introduction in 1957 it has become one of the world’s most ubiquitous typefaces.

Verdana
A font specially designed for use on screen: after being bundled into Windows software from the mid-nineties onwards it has become one of the pre-eminent typefaces on the worldwide web.

Wilhelm Klingspor Gotisch
Rudolf Koch, who designed this font in the 1920s, drew heavily on the shapes and curves learnt during his training as a calligrapher, as he developed this ‘blackletter’ design.

Xheighter
Introduced at the turn of the millennium, Xheighter is a tall, condensed sans-serif that becomes even taller and more condensed when stacked on top of itself.

DFP Yuan
Yuan in Chinese literally means a ‘round object’ or ‘round coin’. Intersecting ¥ symbols have been spun in a circle to create an endless circle of Chinese money.

Zig Zag
This is an inline, Art Deco style typeface that, in 3D, becomes an interlocking, zig-zagging puzzle.

The alphabet is also featured in the February issue of Creative Review in their ‘Monograph’ which is sent to all their subscribers. It will be exhibited for a short period in Arup London’s exhibition space from this Friday for a week (there’s more information here) and in a set of limited edition posters (more details later this week).

Project credits:
Design: johnson banks
Client: Ravensbourne
3d imaging and prototyping: Jon Fidler
Photography: Andy Morgan
Project client: Jill Hogan
Project advisor: Ben Caspersz 

Original Article

Pentax fans will be delighted to know they won’t have to make do with the ill-starred Pentax Q when it comes to higher-end compact cameras.

Thanks to a gun-jumping announcement by camera retail powerhouse B&H Photo Video, details on the rumored Pentax’s K-01 have now emerged. The camera uses the relatively large APS-C-sized sensor and corresponding K mount lenses from Pentax’s SLR line, but omits the bulk-inducing flip-up reflex mirror used for SLRs’ optical viewfinders.

Update 5:10 p.m. PT: Pentax has officially announced the camera, and B&H’s specs were spot on. Pentax also showed sharp-looking yellow and white versions of the camera body, instructed us that we’re to pronounce the camera name “K zero one,” and said it’ll cost $750 for the camera body or $900 with a new 40mm pancake f2.8 lens when it ships in March. The lens alone costs $250.

Pentax K-01 with the new 40mm pancake lens (click to enlarge)

(Credit: Pentax)

In short, Pentax seems to have made more of a mini-SLR than a mega-compact, compensating for the runty Pentax Q sensor with a large, premium-sensor design (though, of course, it’s not nearly as vast and expensive as the sensor in the medium-format Pentax 645D camera). The K-01 approach means that Pentax shooters can keep their lenses–a contrast to how Sony came up with its new E mount for its NEX line of compact interchangeable-lens cameras with APS-C sensors.

Pentax’s new 40mm f2.8 pancake lens

(Credit: PR Web/B&H Photo)

Pentax’s choice also means that the K-01 design is relatively bulky. Smaller sensors don’t offer the same image quality, but they permit smaller lenses. Overall, the approach tilts more in the direction of a smaller option for SLR shooters than the step-up camera for compact camera owners.

Cutting down on the bulk will be the new pancake lens, the Pentax DA 40mm f/2.8 XS, which B&H also revealed. The retailer is accepting preorders for the camera and said the lens will ship in March.

The K-01′s 16-megapixel sensor has a range up to ISO 25,600 and can shoot H.264-encoded video at 1080p and 30 frames per second or 720p at 60fps, B&H said. The K-01 also uses Pentax’s sensor-shift technology to counteract camera shake.

The camera can shoot bursts of 6 frames per second and use shutter speeds up to 1/4000 second, B&H said. It’s got a pop-up flash and a mode for shooting in-camera HDR (high dynamic range) images. The camera and lens were designed by Marc Newson.

The top of the Pentax K-01 (click to enlarge)

(Credit: Pentax)

By Maria Popova

The mathematical poetics of time, or what matrices reveal about the matters of the heart.

Somewhere between the psychology of love and the intricacies of romance lies a vast and unmapped territory of abstract and subjective existential paradoxes. That’s precisely what New-York-based British photographer Julian Hibbard sets out to map in Schematics: A Love Story — a truly unique, in the most uncontrived sense of the word, project exploring love, memory, and time through 43 schematic diagrams drawn from old books and paired with poetic text that gleans new meaning from the geometric forms. From them emerges a layered and paradoxical narrative that is at once very personal and very universal, a kind of forlorn optimism about what it means to be human and to follow the heart’s sometimes purposeful, sometimes erratic, usually unpredictable will in pursuing the deepest of human connections.

 

I learnt to tie my shoes

I learnt to ride my bike

I learnt to smoke

I learnt the vulnerability of fully exposing an idea

I learnt to tie my shoes

I learnt to adapt my behavior in the light of others’ actions.

I learnt the difficulty of sustaining the hopes of youth.

 

 

I remember a French girl with an English name.

‘Leave me now, return tonight,’ she told me every morning, and I did.

 

 

I remember an English girl with an French name.

We were the circle that no one could break, or so I thought.

 

The book, whose own unusual, geometric, highly tactile physicality reflects its substance, begins with a beautiful T. S. Eliot quote:

We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”

 

Yesterday I was there.

Today I am here.

The two are light years apart.

 

 

I dance with a friend,

holding her hand realize,

how disconnected I have become,

from the simple beauty of touch.

 

 

I return and sense,

that things are not the same as before,

but feel had I stayed,

everything would likely seem the same.

 

David LaRocca writes in the afterword-by-placement-introduction-by-purpose:

Schematics operates simultaneously on two distinctive registers: the deeply personal (a love story between the narrator and the objects of his affection, desire, and confusion) and the profoundly anonymous (a love story within matter — subject to gravity, magnetism, genetics, mechanics, electricity, and the space-time continuum.”

 

Your words touch me.

Your thoughts excite me.

I want to try all that.

Explore everything with you.

 

 

Alone.

All one.

 

 

If and but and maybe and whatever.

I hate those words.

 

 

Everything doesn’t have to be perfect.

To idealize is also a form of suffering.

 

LaRocca concludes:

Schematics is a love story because love involves (tragically, incorrigibly, but also beautifully) a desire for something that continuously transforms. Love is painful because we want the object of love to change and the stay the same, love is a desire and a fiction that animates our greatest pleasures and our most profound sufferings. Love holds us to this life, keeps us faithful to it. Yet nothing can save us from our ultimate reentry into oblivion — the point at which no amount of consciousness or desire can preserve identity or the energies that we once called our own. Hibbard’s poetic concept-curating presents schematics that invite us to consider — alone and as ‘all one’ — the existential graphs that underwrite life, and take us out of it.”

 

 

Page images courtesy of Mark Batty Publisher

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Photo by Jay Barker

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Shepard Fairey and his crew kicked off their city-wide art project this afternoon at 331 Singleton. This is the first of several large scale murals that Shepard has designed to dress up Dallas’ nekkid walls. Take a first peek, and then read a little more about today’s scene onUnfair Park.

Photo by Jay Barker

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Photo by Jay Barker

It all leads up to Fairey and the Dallas Contemporary’s Phenomenon dance party on Saturday night.

Photo by Jay Barker

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Fairey and company are still hard at work, posting murals up all over Dallas. Here’s a few photographic dispatches from today’s efforts.

Photo by Jay Barker

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Photo by Jay Barker

​Did you miss yesterday’s snapshots? See them here and check back daily to track the crew’s progress.

PEEL

The way we search for content on TV has not changed since its inception – we channel surf. Not only do satellite and digital cable guides feel antiquated, but the problem is magnified by the hundreds of channels we now have to search for a program.

‘peel’ by yves behar / fuseproject

Peel came to fuseproject in late 2009 with an idea – to revolutionize the way we watch and discover content on TV. Peel is one of those rare implementations of technology that solves a problem in such a way that the user can instantly and entirely forget that the problem has ever existed. Using a free iPhone app (and soon Android) and the Peel Fruit hardware, users can click on a movie or show, search by name, or consult their viewing habits learned by the system.

the peripherals come in pear, apple or orange shapes

The brand principle is to “peel back” the tedious layers of the channel guide and the monotony of channel surfing. This idea is used in the design of the brand, products and UI as an intuitive product ecosystem. Not only does Peel set itself apart in its revolutionary functionality, but the design aesthetics are different than standard TV equipment. In order to relay the phone signal to the TV and other AV equipment, the Peel Fruit is the centerpiece of the product system and is designed to be displayed and celebrated. Each friendly peripheral is a simplified fruit (Pear, Apple, Orange) set at a slight angle, with the lower portion functioning as a large IR window that relays the phone signal to the TV. Instead of being yet another remote, with scores or buttons and a 200 page manual; Peel is fun and friendly, and it keeps its cutting edge technology nearly invisible. Once Peel is hooked up and the App has been downloaded to an iPhone, iTouch or iPad – there is a true “ah ha!” moment when users find what they want painlessly.

Peel is a fuseproject design venture portfolio company. In this type of deep & collaborative partnership, fuseproject works on all facets of the company’s business, providing an effective design-driven strategy for success from very early days through launch. Free from the encumbrances of a typical consulting relationship, we balance roles of creative partner and investor, and build a solid brand foundation.

packaging