14 posts tagged “kolo”
"What?" You asked.
Yes KOLO is synonymous with archival/presentation and most often associated with photography, scrapbooking and art projects. Their Essex Travel Book released this year seems like an odd addition to their product line-up but when you think about it, the whole idea of the Essex series is to bring the KOLO aesthetics and these associations from your archive to your everyday life. You don't carry a typical KOLO product everyday, but you can carry an Essex all the time and treat it as a process to create your final archive/project.
How does this lead to the KOLO-GTD association? If you've been a follower of Scription or lifehacker, you've probably seen my mind.Depositor and its subsequent version as a GTD index card cover. Well, months ago when I received a long awaited Essex in leather, I decided that I wouldn't want to put it into rough use as a notebook. So I employed the law of subtraction, took away the refills and elastic loops and made the cover my new GTD tool.
The medium size Essex is just right for the 6x4" index cards. Since the elastic enclosure is quite strong and I don't intend to walk around dangling this, even though the index cards are not secured inside any pocket, I feel safe enough.
The back side of the window pocket becomes very useful to hold a notepad as a temporary drop box too, how perfect! With a few more creative twist, you can secure the cards when enclosed, unfold the cover all the way to make an "A" stand so you can see your top index card in standing position, etc... I will leave this to you for fun. Don't forget to share here or at Koloist.com if you decide to GTD this way.
One of the cool thing about KOLO's refillable travel book called Essex is that you can actually archive the thinner refill onto a larger album. This way you will have an album showing selected photos as well as the actual journal you used when you were traveling.
Some of us like to stick everything collected in trip to a thicker journal, write a lot and never miss a thing. This creates bulky books and may not be a good sight on a nice clean shelf. KOLO's Essex however invites you to strip things down to the essentials and keep things simple and elegant, just like the usual KOLO aesthetic which brings out your content (photo and text) while the album itself becomes a nice decor.
Travel/Photo journaling style is really a personal choice. I love to create junks and think back later what really happened. On the other hand, I admire clean looks. Perhaps a lot of small/thin refill notebooks filed into a clean album with selected photos is the solution to satisfy both wishes. I'll explore more.
BTW, I really hope the leather version of Essex is coming out sooner. Leaving HK on 28th June for Tokyo!
This year marks the third year of an interesting event to be held in city'super and LOG-ON. In this concept cafe (particularly in Festival Walk's LOG-ON), you will find:
- Stationery and photography travel gears (19th June - 2nd July 2009): Canon, Fuji, Lomo, Moleskine, Midori, KOLO, MT-tapes, LUXE, Kodomo stamps, Staz-on inkpads, etc
- Travel Talks: 3 different sessions on 20th June 2009 presented by traveler and photographers. Learn how to steal time and write better on your journal, life hack tricks included. Why a trip to Cambodia changed a portrait photographer's view on life and how a traveler's mindset is different from a tourist's. How imagery and text combined can create lasting memory through photo journaling. Only a few days left for registration!
- Mini Game with interesting prizes: Follow the instruction on the postcard and go to Festival Walk LOG-ON store, find the hidden message which is a travel quote written by G.K. Chesterton, write it down and submit. You get a chance to win nice gifts from great brands (check out this Flickr photo and move your mouse over to see what they are)
- Stamp your notebook/postcard: Yes stamps, bring your notebook or use our postcard. I've made these icons into self inking stamps for your fun: Moleskine, LCA, Travel Cafe logo, fountain pen. They sort of summarized what this event is all about. Also, Designphil (Midori) in Japan made these two stamps for our event too! They are only available in Hong Kong during this period, so collect them while you can!
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Enjoy!
After secretly injecting my personal interest of photography in our merchandising for the past 4 years, I was finally granted to have such a real section in the new APM LOG-ON store. If I were to propose such section on day 1, it wouldn't be approved, it would be subjected to a series of scrutiny, inquiry, doubts and attacks, eventually became an unfinished project on corporate earth.
I'm thankful even though it takes time for them. But in the process I figured all forces mysteriously working together towards this hidden agenda, mysteriously! Through numerous small projects, vendors getting more mature, customer showing more interests, higher standard is achieved..... I'm intrigued. All these require just one single binding force of good will and aspiration. Well, it is no big achievement but for myself it is rewarding enough.
The Photography retail business on earth is amazingly boring. You want a camera you walk into a camera shop, you want something printed you go to a lab, you want gadgets you go back to a camera shop. There is no CONTENT and sharing in all of them. On the surface, if you go to this Photography section of ours, it can appear all too commercial, composed with brands like Lomography, KOLO, Canon, Fuji Film, Umbra, etc. But look, there are people behind these brands working hard to bring out the fun and aesthetics to everyday lives. What's lacking in this industry is just a place to find and share contents. I'm not saying this very section is in its ultimate form, but it is a start, a very primitive start.
If you remember the "Our Last Polaroids" event last year (community photos here, here, here, here, here, here and here), it is the best memory I got in this journey. The online and offline community worked hand in hand to pull off this 2 week exhibition and gathering. It is the nearest form of the ultimate Photography gathering space in my mind.
Well back to reality. The most appealing thing about this area is that it is not a camera shop or lab. I gathered quite a few things related to analog, film, album, frame, photography, polaroid camera and films, lighters, key chains, instax, lomo, superheadz, prisms, etc. You can say it is a collage in retail form. Again, I'm not proud of its current state yet, I'm only proud of the process. So there's still a lot to do.
BTW, FujiFilm Hong Kong gave us great support recently. They made us this little Instax town display for our new store launch. Very creative use of instax film on paper made figures! How lovely.
I received this great sample of Traveler's Notebook passport size from Midori in end Feb 2009. This product is to be launched in March following the success of its large size version. I've put it into test and made some customization for the exhibition in Tokyo to be held between 19th March and 22nd March 2009 in Spiral Market.
You see, if you keep track of what's going on in this blog, you've probably already noticed something big about travel, photography and journaling all along. KOLO launched Essex, Midori launched Traveler's Notebook passport size. AND I'm gonna have fun with fellow readers and customers in our 2009 June's Travel Photo Cafe! Stay tuned!
To see more photos of my customization, do visit this flickr set.
To see more photos of my customization, do visit this flickr set.
I learned from KOLO this new project since last year May's National Stationery Show, a portable travel notebook which combines photo storage and journaling functions using a flexible refill system. As you know, KOLO is almost entirely about photo archiving and presentation, they obviously did a great job to create clean and stylish product lines but most of these products are to be used *afterward*. You select photos, plan layouts, do scrapbooking stuffs, archiving and presenting the final outcome as a decor or sharing with friends and relatives after events. I was extremely excited to see how they would execute this travel notebook idea and come up with a final product, which you can carry with you during travel and making memories on the fly. I had a lot of expectations because bringing archival quality to a product you use everyday inevitably requires a whole new mindset. I mean KOLO can be perfect in their top notch material quality but an object you would use on daily basis subjects to a whole new set of hazardous situations especially when we are talking about travel. What a challenge.
- works well with Polaroids and Instax mini
- portable size but smaller than A5
- pockets to store receipts, tickets, etc
- paper good for roller ball, fountain pen and watercolor
- soft cover to handle bulging contents
- refill notebooks can be filed pleasantly to an album or archive system
- customizable to personal style
- enclosure not intruding front cover
- photo and writing on the same page possible
- clean cover design, tough to resist travel tortures
- archival quality
I'm sure these requirements are not that far fetch, but execution will eventually meet design and inevitably facing lots of scrutiny versus brand identity and personality. Product design and innovation, a fun game to watch as a by-stander but I never forget to appreciate the ingenious hard work behind.
Following a discussion at Koloist.com's recent post "True Confessions of a Former Pack Rat", I'm to reveal my way of using KOLO's Havana boxes. I own 3 Havana boxes, a black bonded leather medium, a red cloth medium and a green cloth large. The 2 medium ones are in my office. I use the black one to store name cards bundled by events, the red one is for storing postage stamps and interesting papers I collected from company mails. So I'm not using these boxes for photos at all coz the hurdle to start get organized with ALL of your prints is simply too high I stalled.
The green large Havana box at home is used to store paper stuffs related to my son. I limited the collection to paper and some photos otherwise 10 boxes would not be enough. Here's the content:
- A large Moleskine notebook: I write down key events and funny stuffs I heard from my son. Sometimes I stick photos in it.
- A Moleskine Japanese album in small size: It was unfolded and used as a decoration of our living room shelf. It contains pages of me and my wife's baby pictures, wedding pictures and my son's baby photos. It is like a story unfolded.
- Photo copies of drawings I made for my son, postcards I sent to him when I was overseas for business, his first movie ticket, all these small stuffs.
- A large sketch book: this is the most interactive part of my treasure chest. I would pick up this sketch book once in a while and ask my son what he wants to see on a page. Most of the time he would say McQueen or Thomas, he is never bored by them, but I would ask a few questions to steer him away from those thoughts. Eventually we would end up with a very nice page we both like a lot. In this picture you see a blue/red stripe box with a hole. My son looked inside using a flash light and found 2 blue birds, so we went to a dark room bringing this sketch book and try to investigate further how they look like. We used flash light, we inserted our little fingers to the hole to feel their feathers, we were pecked by them, they flew out in the dark room and our flash light went wild searching for them while we could hear them chirped. We finally realized that we were actually in the same situation as these 2 blue birds. We were in a dark room with windows, "perhaps a huge finger will push through the window and poke us like what we did to the blue birds!" And then we ran around the room to hide from the window. I asked my son if that huge finger really poke us, what would he do, he said "hit it! hit it hard!", I said "Oh I see, we would do the same like those two little blue birds! That's why they pecked us, they were scared". And "what if that huge finger belongs to a giant who's also inside a bigger box called Earth? ...." Our mind flew away and we had such a great time imagining, all through one drawing. This I treasure a lot.
Second to the bikini on Koloist's Chaotic Universe post was the mentioning of post card which got me into this connection thing again. Now I don't consciously collect them but somehow I have them around me (and I don't mean bikini) and keep bumping into relating events and shops.
In 2007 I went to the Lomo World Congress event in London (1st Day, 2nd Day, Photos). On the last day of my visit, 30 mins. away from leaving the Royal National Hotel I saw a poster of the Bloomsbury Postcard Fair happening right there in a conference hall! The event happens EVERY SINGLE MONTH! But I got less than 30 mins., without waiting I paid 1.5 pounds and met really interesting folks!
I didn't know where to start, it was crazy, the clock was ticking. So I went to more organized exhibitors, the classification and the way they store them alone worth the entire trip to UK, it is like a primitive Google for searching postcards. You name it, they have a way. By countries, 30's 40's 50's, wars, transportations, children, eras, .... My mind flew away imagining that if there is such a physical search engine sorting resorting these postcards on the fly according to your search terms, wouldn't it be a sight?
And I met Ken Lister, a regular visitor to the show. He gave me some hints on how to find things there and he mentioned that there is such a fair happening in Hong Kong which I didn't know! Ken was an extensive traveler, been to many places in South East Asia, I wish there was more time to chat with him. Tick tock tick tock.
Postcards are not the only thing you find in this fair. Torn pages from old books/bibles, letters/deeds written by people long gone, surveyor's map, etc etc...... One thing in common though, you may not be aware of it but when you think about it, they are all PAPERS!! This amazed me really.
With only the last few pounds I had, I got 2 advertising postcards from fountain pen makers and 2 postcards of the "Peak Tramway and Barracks, Hong Kong", of which one of them was written by a Frenchman probably to his girlfriend in France. Imagine where this postcard had travelled and how it is connected to so many people. Again, if there is such a physical search engine to travel through time returning all properties relating to one particular object, ... oh perhaps too far fetched technically, we might as well just go to the Akashic Records to do the trick.
Here's a few more links of my postcard adventure:
- Postkarten shop in Cologne Germany I stumbled upon recently.
- Polaroid Postcard, a flickr group where people exchanging postcards in Polaroid format. You gotta try, beautiful.
- Altered Postcard Art, use any postcard, alter it to suit your own artistic vision.
Finally, I've always had great times doing these personal postcards using "spare time" during business trips and I'm not stopping as long as there is postal service available. See Hairspray and Bird Shit, Birthday Postcard to Okuyama san. God give me more time on earth!
I like to shoot films and usually ask the lab to print all photos, gotta feel the nasty pain of complete failure in order to shoot better, especially when I'm not familiar with a new camera. This inevitably left me with a looot of prints I won't throw away but shy to show by themselves. Many of them are not too bad, in fact good enough to be a backdrop of another great photos.
With a little photo shuffle matching color and tone, I can easily find places where these photos belong. A simplest way is to put them right into a KOLO Capri cloth album, then add smaller format main photos in front. The result is a colorfully complicated psychedelic canvas which when presented to a perceptive viewer or even an oracle may explain why you were in such deep trouble in the last year.
Why not? You can play with your 78 not so familiar tarot cards to tell your own fortune, why not shuffle images you took and contemplate what's going on with your life? After-all, they are images streaming from your past actions, thoughts and feelings bound to carry tidbits of tasty subconscious juice. Here's some examples:
My train of ideas runs underground, can you catch a glimpse of me peeking into the world on public ground? Rear mirror.
Using a lot of double exposures enhances the flow of your creative juice. So go shuffle!
One other way to use Capri is to take away the pocket sleeve and write down your thoughts about the photos on the opposite page. Yet another great photo journaling tool!
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