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Beautiful TN Icons by Thomas Huang

Thanks to my great friend Mr. Thomas Huang who generously shared these beautiful Mac icons to the world.  I couldn't help but to post them immediately.  2 weeks ago Thomas was being invited to our culture club LOG-ON Togather to share his "10 Reasons to Love TN" to our members.  During his presentation, he promised to share some of his beautifully created icons and he did just now.  Enjoy!  Download here.

這是Thomas在聚會中答應大家的Mac icon。以下是他在Traveler's Notebook Hong Kong User Group面書群組的post:

各位TNHKUG的朋友新年快樂！今年第一件事，就是為大家獻上在LOG-ON答應大家要製作的叮叮車icon組（Mac only），請大家自由下載！
有任何使用上的問題，歡迎留言喔！Windows版本請再等等，謝謝！
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https://app.box.com/s/e8w5lhdevgtm0bs53229

12 Years of Descriptions Shows

It's the most important time of the year when we re-visit each department's concept.  Although it is an everyday process to find out what's next and how we are doing, we have to lay down some concrete actions to make things happen in this fiscal year.  For those buyers who are prepared, pulling out key observations and solidifying them into concrete plans is easy, the others just pulled out rubbish, no offense.

This is one of the side projects I've been working on, to have some kind of objective meta data composed to give me angles and insights.  The oldest data I could pull out was 12 years old, I was interested to find out the most frequent words appearing on our product descriptions, the more frequent they appeared, the larger these words appears on this word cloud.  Interesting isn't it?

Correlating frequency of appearance vs. sold quantity (not shown here for business reasons) was such a fun project to me, had a great time.

This explains the lack of post on my blog, please follow me on instagram @patrickng, twitter @scription, flickr @moleskineart, if you want to catch up with tiny feeds instead of waiting for blog post to come up :)

Will be travelling to Shanghai next Monday to Friday, hopefully I can get some free time to update the next Chronodex download for July - December 2012.

Chronodex Daily GTD in GhostWriter Notes iPad App "Paper" Format Released

For those of you who want to enjoy the everyday creativity Chronodex brings, but already moved on to digital note taking or scheduling, I've made Chronodex available for you in digital format.

GhostWriter Notes iPad app is one of the best digital notebooks you can find on a tablet.  Since the creation of Chronodex, many of you want to apply the idea in your own preferred paper and notebook size and format, some of you adapted it into stickers, printed on tracing paper.  Now you can have the same fun on your iPad, just download the Chronodex Daily GTD for GhostWriter Notes JPG, save it in your photo library, choose the image from your GhostWriter Notes "paper" setting, that's it. (Update: seems like the same JPG file works very well on another iPad app called Noteshelf too)

GhostWriter Notes is like a scrapbooking page with dozens of nice features you can play with your Chronodex core.  I love the choice of ink pen which gives you very fine lines to color your pies.  You can simply use the Chronodex core as your mindmapping center on GhostWriter as well.  If you look into the details of the format, I'm sure you will find your very own creative use of the core.

Shelves and Shelves of Treasured Things and Stories to Tell

If I were to have my own place (gee it is almost impossible now given the high property price here in Hong Kong and I am probably too late, too unwilling to work my butts off giving my entire salary to mortgage), I would have all walls filled with bookshelves, custom made or genuine trays of the letterpress shelves, boxes and blackboards etc to build memories, concepts and ideas.

In these shelves/trays, they hold small chunks of memories though collection of objects and visuals.  Each object tells a story of my adventures, places I've been to and concepts coming from my little brain.  A real life Akashic Record of myself open to everybody.  I don't know what it means in front of God, or if it means anything to anybody, but at least being able to see those shelves of my life in my mind already gives me the basic grasp of who I am, that's what life is about isn't it?  To discover yourself.  Now I accept donations :P

Pencil Sharpener Rant - Inkling on Moleskine, again

Yet another week passed seeing nonsense going on in certain poor company-wide execution.  Poor logic, calculation and consideration (no those are not algorithms, at all) executed in the name of efficiency and ideal automation.  Simply said, replacing human decision with formulae requires deep understanding and serious simulations *before* execution.  Now is the stage when a lot more human intervention is required to fix certain poor logics.

Yes I'm a sharpener mining my my own business shaping the future in my own ways.  Forcing some nonsense into me and I'll keep cranking until raging fume comes out because I refuse to play nice to nonsense.  The day when I need protection is the day I lost my value as a sharpener, as blades are not meant to be protected, they are to shape.

Ok, enough self proclaimed heroism.  This is just a quick sketch using Inkling on my Moleskine, graphically rant about my recent encounter with sick things.  The drawing was exported to Photoshop using Sketch Manager and colored in a sloppy way.  Enough to calm me down, call it a therapy.

Wacom Hong Kong is going to have a press conference on 28th Sep 2011 to announce Inkling officially.  Since I'm a big fan of Inkling and still sort of a Moleskine fanatic while luckily being the stationery buyer of a retail chain, I'm arranging a promotion in October: Buy Inkling and get 20% off for Moleskine Sketchbook (large or small).  This simulation of store display was done in 30 minutes while attending a presentation meeting.  I'm very happy to be able to get support from both Wacom and Moleskine for such campaign in such a short time.  It won't be a big hit, but at least it benefits certain stationery lovers who happen to love both Inkling and Moleskine.  Let's see how it will turn out.

From Ideas and Simulations to Making Them Real - with a lot of help from colleagues

Yet another year has passed, I really didn't realize until I grew tired of something at work lately and counted, that it is the 8th Back To School campaign I managed.  I couldn't believe it, and it is best for me to stop and let the next guy take over.  To linger a bit more, I imagined next year's campaign would feature "The End Of the World BTS Catalog" hahahah, a lot of fun games, dressed up staff, in-store characters displayed…. etc.  What do you care, it's the end of the world…. kind of cool.  Anyway, the idea will perhaps stays with me and still looks beautiful without actualizing it :)

I strived to add new elements to every year's campaign, mostly on concepts, accurate 3D layout, analysis and games.  Too bad this year there are not much new merchandise from Japan (after the quake) and things are pretty slack.  But so far this is the best year ever in terms of contribution from every division.

I'm particularly happy about this year's simulation, in fact so proud I showed my son how it was done from scratch.  First it was a sketch on paper, then I worked on 3D simulation on Google SketchUp accurate to the millimeters, fantastic colleagues from VMD made them real finally.  My son was watching me orbiting the simulated scenes on computer, asking all sorts of questions, he wanted to go to help setting up the actual event and to watch when it first opened and customers coming in.  Eventually I took him to Times Square in the middle of the event, at first he was just casually looking around, not particularly excited I guess because it was not really a back to school event for young kids.  All of a sudden, he said calmly "so amazing".  That's enough for me, I didn't need any award.

So let's see what will come to change and I will put some thoughts on it during my trip to Switzerland next week (yes for work).  After all, my tarot amplified my thoughts about putting plans into action, inner strength and courage to take risks.  Will see, will see.

Meet Yourself - A Back To School 2011 Event 12th Aug - 1st Sep

This year our back to school theme will be "Meet Yourself!" in city'super and LOG-ON.  I realized for a long while that we've never really geared our promotion in terms of "school supplies", but rather "Personalization, Customization and Individualism".  So I decided to play down the "back to school" name a bit and "invited" 9 very distinct characters whom you will find appearing in our event area and on leaflets, to show you what they like, perhaps you will identify yourself to some of them naturally.

In this event, which is a painstakingly difficult thing to pull off involving so many parties, we will have Personalization Zone, Gadgets and Basic Stationery Zone, iPad/iPhone/Headphone Zone, Fashion/Bag Zone and Brand Zone.  All in Times Square city'super for the period 12th Aug to 31st Aug (while in other stores, they are the smaller sized versions of the Times Square one and last until 1st Sep).

As usual, we get the privileged support from various Japanese stationery makers to have offer items that are new and exclusively imported for this event: UNI StyleFit single body with dot patterns, UNI Cutie & Cool series, PILOT Coleto Heart series (very difficult to get from Japan!), PENTEL Vicuna 2+1 pen, ZEBRA award winning Arbez series.

Our dear friends from Korea stationery industry also supported us with brand new product lines and beautiful displays.  I wish we had more time and manpower to cope with their sheer volume of creativity. Brands include: Antenna Shop, 7321 Design, E2, Pony Brown, Lollipop, Indigo, Elago, Vistadesign, etc.

Chocolate Rain fans will be delighted to see a 1.7m Fatina along side with a bunch of new products such as umbrella, keychain, iPad cases, etc, thanks to Prudence and her friendly partners to make it happen again this year.

Staedtler will be demonstrating how to use their coloring products, while an exclusive DIY pencil set will be available too.  Cote et Ciel new arrival from France.  Soul by Ludacris demonstration booth with show girls.  Hello Kitty speakers, Jays earphones, Tunewear collections, iHome mood light speakers, mix tape USB drive, music match and doll earphones, water dancing speakers, etc etc.

Purchase any Nike bags from us you will also get this cool notebook set for free (while stock last, about a thousand pieces).  It is a nylon cover with 3 A5 sized notebook refills (ruled, squared and plain).  North Face, Puma, Gregory bags will be present in the event too.  Don't forget to check out our own production bags which each of the series are named after those 9 characters I mentioned above (Nicole, Nic, Mandy, Rika, Nikki, Matt, Max, Wilson, Eagle).

I'm not very organized here but you will soon see our "Meet Yourself!" leaflet coming out, feel free to pick it up and explore.  There is even a matching game with very nice prizes, you just have to figure out which pair of those 9 characters are currently "in a relationship" :)

Dymo LabelManager Plug and Play - So Much Easier To Print

If you do a lot of labeling, on object that is, this new Dymo LabelManager Plug and Play will be extremely helpful.  I love Dymo for their embossers, especially those made in the old days (this, this and this), but really hate those electronic ones with keypads on them.  They are clumsy to type, difficult to choose the right font and size without wasting a few inches of tapes.  Worst of all, if you loose the manual, it will be very difficult to find out how to get that special character you knew its there inside.

This plug and play model is easy to, well no need to install, just plug in to your Mac or PC, a built-in flash memory appears as a disk on your computer where you will find the software to run.  It is that easy.  Simply start typing, changing the font as you would on your typical word processor and press print.  It uses the fonts available on your computer so you don't need to feel like being forced to accept ugly fonts from the machine.  Works great on Chinese and Hong Kong specific characters.

If you press enter during your typing, the font automatically shrink about half the size and you can do double line, triple or more within the height of the D1 tape.  One interesting feature is screen capture.  Just press a button in the software and your cursor changes to crosshair for selecting part of your screen, once done the captured image will appear right on the on-screen tape and you can print right away.  Resolution is of course low and dithered, but that allows you to quickly put a company logo or small images on tapes.

It will be available at city'super soon selling at HK$680 with free gift (I heard that it will be a 2GB USB memory while stock last).  Here's the promotional video of the machine.

 

Tunefolio URBAN Wide iPad Case Debut

The much anticipated Tunewear iPad case called Tunefolio URBAN finally arrived our stores, Hong Kong is the first place in the world to have it.  The predecessor Tunefolio (HK$349), which won the Good Design Award from Japan, was our bestselling iPad case series ever.  Instead of faux leather, URBAN selling at HK$399, features even more durable nylon, very slim profile with detachable strap which allows you to carry across your shoulder.

The usual flexible stand position of Tunefolio remains with additional velcro so you can fix the iPad position at your desired viewing angle.

I was using my iPad with the original Tunefolio to stock taking fixture delivery when we were setting up our new Langham Place LOG-ON store. I wish I had URBAN at that time coz that added strap is a really useful feature not many iPad case have, you don't need to worry where to lay your iPad in public place when all of a sudden you need both hands to do something else in that kind of situation.

 

Hashy Top-in's Phone x Phone

This cool new iPhone gadget arriving not long ago were being sold like hot cakes in our stores and we went out of stock for a few days, luckily we are able to grab some remaining stocks from their factory.

Hashy Top-in's Phone x Phone is an all-in-one charging/sync/speaker/handset station with a nice matt rubber coating, which allows you to dock your iPhone to charge and sync while having the added benefit of reducing your brain's exposure to cell phone radiation (or more scientifically known as the level of cell phone specific absorption rate (SAR), which measures the quantity of radio frequency energy that is absorbed by the body).

 

The button on the back of the handset is used to end calls.  When music is playing, you can use it to jump forward/backward to the next/previous song.  Black, white, pink, yellow and blue colors are available, each selling at HK$238.  It works for iPhone 3G/3Gs/4.  Tell you what, Pink is our best seller so far, if you can't grab it this weekend, you won't get it as a Xmas gift in time.