Stay well, go well

K&i say good-bye to our beloved old blog and a warm hello! to our new one, pay us a visit: kandi.co.za/blog

Freelancers needed

We are looking for talented graphic design freelancers to work with us on a project to project basis.

What we are looking for someone with:

Great attention to detail
Ability to work under pressure
Good communications skills and ability to keep to tight deadlines
Experience working with layout and publication design for print
A good attitude
And a minimum of 3 years work experience

To apply, please send your cv/portfolio/links, your hourly/day rate, as well as an example of a project fee (your project fee on a previous project - please show example) to ida@kandi.co.za

Closing date 28/11/2014

How to come up with new ideas...

It's that time of the year... lots of coffee and sideways thinking... We are knee-deep in designing this year's Spark Book for the SA Innovation Summit, this year held in Cape Town!

A couple of months back we had a strat session, coming up with concepts for the book. So how do you come up with new ideas? These are our suggestions:

1. Leave your computer, find a sunny/warm room and move.
2. Get lots of paper, post-it notes, and pens
3. Make a cup of coffee
4. Make sure there is snacks like nuts and seeds
5. Write down some topics
6. Brainstorm freely, and individually, write down all ideas that comes to mind - no editing!
7. Discuss the ideas
8. Choose the best ones
9. Expand on the chosen ideas

In a couple of hours we had a whole table of ideas, some totally irrelevant, some really good ones, and some not so good... After some refining, the book is now planned and stocked with the most original, relevant and innovative pages to get your creativity to flow.

Get yours at the summit!

We are working on it...

Some of you might have noticed the lack of new work on our website, and no it's not because we haven't done any new work, on the contrary we've done some amazing work for some amazing clients in the last few months and can't wait to share their stories and visuals with you.

You might have to sit tight for just a little bit longer, we are in the midst of updating our own brand and website so lots of changes coming soon...

Exhibition to visit if you are in London: Henri Matisse

If we were in London this is an exhibition we wouldn't miss, Henri Matisse cut outs at Tate Modern. To us, his bold use of colour and shape, the "naive" finishing and playfulness, has a combination of both African and Scandinavian feel. Maybe it's time to take out some colourful paper and scissors?

Exhibition runs until September 2014

 

Images from www.tate.org.uk and www.henri-matisse.net

Handmade textile prints

We have been experimenting with some black and white hand painted textile prints, using a brush and different handmade stamps.

Herby tomato salad

Made this tasty tomato salad with freshly grown herbs today for lunch, perfect even on a crisp day like today.

Ingredients:

Grated carrots
Sliced tomatoes
Finely chopped onion
Rocket, basil and coriander
Balsamic vinegar
Olive oil
Salt and pepper

Perfect with homemade bread
and lots of cheese

SAIS 2013 - Part 6

The conclusion, this brings us to the end of our 2013 SAIS project report. Like with any good novel you have a beginning, a middle and an end. And we believe that the end is just as, if not more important than a flashy beginning. To conclude the book we left the readers with a quote by Successories, "You cannot discover oceans unless you have the courage to leave the shore".

We made the end seem cinematic in our approach where one can follow the unfolding squares parting from the SAIS logo and watch them transform themselves into what finally becomes the iconic paper bird used for this years theme. The back pages when folded out show the transformation taking place and seamlessly brings you back to the very start of the book. The motivation for this came about as we wanted to leave the viewer craving with new eagerness to approach their thinking from a creative perspective and not let that thought slip away after closing the book.

SAIS 2013 - Part 5

Throughout the notes section we encourage interaction and play. We came up with a few clever ways to make sure we achieved this. Tear out pages for making your own telescope, origami construction and a page you can fold and doodle with a partner to make an experimental drawing. Each and every creative page comes with purpose; the telescope relays the message of focussing your thoughts, the origami construction forces right brain thinking and drawing with a partner shows unexpected results through collaboration.

Further play comes in the form of discovery, lifting your page to the light reveals hidden messages. Or treating the book as a flip book and flicking through the pages from back to front displays an animated quote "The whole is greater than the sum of its parts".

SAIS 2013 - Part 4

iPads are rad for taking notes but they don't fold as well as paper does. There's something about a tangible product that allows one to slowly drift into another place while the pen stroke turns from a letter into a doodle, and then the next big idea.

A place for making notes is essential to any conference, and vital to the Innovation Summit. By using a slightly off kilter notes section we encourage creativity, originality and that out of the box thinking.

Missed our end of year newsletter?

If you missed our end of year newsletter, not to worry, you can check it out here. To make sure you don't miss the next one, sign up here!

SAIS 2013 - Part 3

The Speakers. The 'serious stuff', with an aim to inform still requires that little bit of spice needed to engage and excite the reader. We continued the theme by chopping off the heads of several great minds and dropped them onto a bunch of street pigeons taking flight.

We do things a little differently at K&i and yes it takes a little longer but what you end up with is a stronger finished product. Instead of creating a single speaker template and rolling it out, we opted for 4 and still managed to create room for movement beyond these templates.