I love LogoLounge

I (and Brandient) feel LL's love for quite a while now and—as the minimalist title says—I love LL back, too. Let me explain:

• 2005 – Bill invites me to be part of LogoLounge 3 international jury;
• 2006 – LogoLounge 3 book features Brandient works;
• 2006 – LogoLounge 3 book features me (the merciless juror, ha!);
• 2006 – Bill likes my Radiocom and Domo identites and my Smartree packaging and writes beautiful words about them in Identity Magazine at Best of the Best 2006 in Moscow;
• 2006 – In his 2006 Trends Report, published in the April issue of Graphic Design USA magazine, Bill features Brandient work: Radiocom and Europharm;
• 2006 – Cathy kindly offers me the opportunity of an interview on LL web site as featured designer;
• 2007 – LL's home-page displays Europharm¹ logo (see the picture above) taking me by surprise. Later edit: it seems that Radiocom was featured as well.

What can I say? Thank you, Bill Gardner. Thank you, Cathy Fishel.

¹ Designed by Bogdan Dumitrache, award winner in international competitions.

Kit·blog enters fifth year today

Will the 5th be a good year? A bad one? Light, dark? Long, short? Thick, thin?

Past

For almost one year at the current address (kitblog.com), previously (since 2003) located on my .Mac account (homepage.mac.com/cpaul/iblog), this blog approaches 1000 posts—one freaking thousand?!?—and counts over 600 self-made photos. Thousands of comments (that—unfortunately—disappeared from the old location). Four years of blogging, some pretty good, one not so great and a platform change that felt more like starting over.

Thanks

Thanks for dropping by, folks.

While every visit makes me feel good, still, I'm doing my best to keep this blog a little pensive and away from being a middlebrow affair. Thank you for stopping by and reading it.

Thank you for subscribing to my feed. For me, this means that more than a couple of hundreds of you care about what I'll concoct next. Thanks.

Years don't mean much when a blog is dead. And with no comments, nor e-mails, it would be—I do appreciate each and every comment and e-mail (yes, even when I'm too busy to reply). Thank you for sparing the time to share a thought.

Thank you for linking here and for spreading the word—this turns a blog from personal entertainment into something else, something much bigger. The perfect example would be the anti-SDPR's design law protest, when blogs and massive linking turned into a formidable power and triggered mainstream media responses in the country and abroad. Also, I'm grateful for being listed in your blogrolls. Thank you.

Future

Que Sera, Sera / Whatever will be, will be / The future's not ours, to see / Que Sera, Sera / What will be, will be.

Romanian Atheneum in Bucharest, as seen last night.

We love to hate its guts, but every now and then we must concede: Bucharest has its moments. Yes, they are still few and far in-between, but they do exist and least we can do is stop in our way for a minute and acknowledge them.

Yesterday at Romexpo Hall I expected my DNA to be sampled and checked upon admission so they can screen the valids from the poor god children. They somehow forgot. Nevertheless, I hid my glasses in a pocket—just in case.

There are situations when dogs are much more delicate and well mannered than humans—the totally wrong situation, usually. For instance, this civilized and respectable dog awaited for a menu with patience, even if he was the only customer sitting at a terrace table while the waiters ignored him repeatedly.

I wish he chased the monkey suits around a little bit, challenge the food chain. Get some respect. Put an end to this discrimination where every crassly ill-bred barbarian dressed with embroidered jeans like a bankrupt fat Elvis sporting shovel fingernails and a biohazard hairdo gets more respect than a clean, exemplary behaving dog.

Seriously high speed and no music, only the absolute awareness of tires pulling the distant city lights closer and closer.

Little hotel friends—Târgu Mureș, Transylvania, 2007.

Captain David at The Coca-Cola Base Station on Mars, 2007.

True, there's little water around here, but our sponsor sends us plenty of soda from Earth. As soon as we're done with the wiring, flick a switch—Bang!—"Planet Coke." Can't wait, really.

On the other hand, NASA is annoying. They keep sending their freaking Pathfinder rovers that are roaming around taking pictures and sniffing for cooties like some goddamn sleepwalking paparazzi. Lucky they're utterly confused and functioning in slow-motion so we have enough time to collect all the chewing gum and the cigarette stubs littered in their way.

Remote controlled snapshots-taking robots! If this is not a tabloidization of cosmology, I don't know what is.

Anaezi Modu — founder of ReBrand competition — pings me via e-mail:

I would appreciate it if you could spread the word about the upcoming deadline for the 2008 ReBrand 100 through your blog or whatever network you think makes sense there. Our time is short before September 26, so all the help offered is greatly welcome!

If you have case studies to send, better hurry up. Spread the word, too.

For those who are not familiar with this competition, "ReBrand 100 Global Awards, juried by an esteemed panel of international business leaders, is the highest recognition for brand rebuilding and redesign in the business arena."

Brandient won until now 5 awards in this global competition: 2 Distinction Awards in 2007 with Domo and Savana and 3 Merit Awards in 2005 with Romanian Public Television, Europharm and Smartree. This means it's totally doable.

Furthermore, in 2006 Brandient's Managing Partner Aneta Bogdan was part of the high-profile international jury that gathered in Providence, Rhode Island, along with Steve Frykholm – Vice President and Creative Director of Herman Miller, Bill Hill – Chairman & Founder of MetaDesign San Francisco, Ed Lussier – Senior Vice President and Creative Director with Reebok and Po Cheung – Managing Director at FutureBrand China, to name only a few.

Click for the entry form — and good luck!

The slow ASCII

What do you write about when you're not in the mood for writing? And, as you probably noticed already, I'm not in the mood and I haven't been posting much text for a while now. Don't know exactly why, but it has to do with a couple of (huge and complicated) ongoing projects at Brandient — and fighting the urge of posting irrelevant junk (like this post) for compulsion's sake .

So I post photos — I hope you don't mind. If you do mind, well, please leave a note and I'll move the entire Photography topic out of the homepage, to a blog of its own, like Notes or Articles.

The Japanese

Speaking of photos, I spend my nights lately searching for pearls in the big pond of mud called Flickr¹, where I'm closely following around 80 photographers and a lot of thematic groups.

I'm really drawn toward Asian photographers using film cameras — their serenity, perfect compositions and bokeh (from the Japanese boke ぼけ, "blur") aesthetic philosophy. And I found quite a few of them. Let me give you a few hints and you'll see what I'm talking about:

• Tommy Toshihiro Oshima [DNA] — look for his Noctilux f 1.o shots, like the gorgeous low-light portraits rad! and resonance, but don't miss hypnosis, sleepwalker, guardian, dioramic sunday, the ninth gate or captive to open your appetite;
• Clarice Mami Koni [DNA] — she loves Russian cameras and medium format. I love her in_the_grass and 8 but you should browse through bicycle, breeze, siesta_#1, mountain_path and with_simon to get the idea;
• Sakazoh Yayoi Sakamoto [DNA] — My favorite is Kagurazaka #13, but you should take a look at works like POLAROID #13, POLAROID #24, POLAROID #27, SCALA #04 and SCALA #06;
• Papaiya [DNA] — stunning medium format low-key photography. A few personal quick faves: /, in mirror, Friday, no child, conditioner, L and 0808f;
• Golban [DNA] — take a look at Carousel, -, 木漏れ日, 7, * and working man.

That's it for now, five of them — more to come. I hope you'll kick back a minute and get into the proper mood to enjoy these beauties.

The masthead

Photography is great and an image is worth a thousand words — a thousand totally irrelevant words, sometimes. This is why I killed the photo masthead and switched from this:

to this:

It uses the same screen real estate, only wiser. Hopefully.

¹ No, this doesn't mean changing my mind about digital proletarianism — I still believe that only elite makes the Internet a great place — and the elite photographers is what I'm looking for on Flickr.

Progress is a wonderful thing. If — and when — The Ministry of Truth says so.

Victor Rebengiuc, one of Romania's greatest living actors, Bucharest, 2007.

Accomplished greatness comes prepackaged with either ginormous arrogance or serene humbleness and it rarely falls in between.

With a monumental filmography comprising almost fifty movies — and spanning over more than 5 decades — Victor Rebengiuc manages to remain a sweet, gentle giant.