Container Shop

Happened to be in Zürich last weekend, on saturday I walked passed the Freitag Zürich store, a brand which uses recycled truck advertising material to make bags and other accessories. Quite an interesting concept and certainly markets well as everyone in Zürich seem to be walking around with one. I first saw their store in the Helvetica documentary and saw it by chance while I was on the S-Bahn so I went to take a look at it. Located close to Hardbrücke station, in the old industrial area right beside the busy tracks with passenger and fright train passing by. Just like the concept of the brand, designer Annette Spillmannn and Harald Echsle  uses old container to create a small tower, with the shop settled inside. This is quite a bold move in terms of choice of location for a flagship store for a brand, but it managed to capture a lot of attention. Looks old and rusty outside but the interior is well decorated, and the product is stacked in a box with a photo of it printed on the outside.

It's everywhere

Since my GCSE D&T project, I have pretty much stick with the same presentation style for almost all of my work, for this I have to give credit to my favourite font, Helvetica. This font is just everywhere. Some say that font is very boring, but I think that it is everything because it fit in with most thing around us so well. The font itself carries a natural feeling that you can use it to express anything. The form of the letter are made up of simple and clean line, which visually appears to be firm and clean. The US government uses it in their document to appear efficient, huge amount of companies uses it in their branding, Lufthansa, BMW, MUJI, Nestlé, FENDI, Wallpaper*, the list goes on an on. In fact I'm writing this blog in Helvetica.

It all started with Max Miedinger and Eduard Hoffmann in Switzerland in the 60s, they wanted to create a simple and natural typeface, their type design company were own by Stempel, who gave it the name Helvetica in latin which means `The Swiss'. It was then sold globally and remain heavily influential until now.

I have been trying different font occasionally in my work, but I always go back to Helvetica at the end because I know that I could be sure that the overall presentation would work much better together than using other expressive font.

There is also a documentary on the font by Gary Hustwit if you want to find out more about the font.

Thank you BAA

Last year seemed like most of my travelling didn't go so smoothly with all the strikes and volcano. Just before christmas, I was stuck YET AGAIN trying to get to Hong Kong from Edinburgh. Thanks to the very efficient and hard working BAA, I was stuck in the UK for 5 days and ended up taking 4 different flight to get home...
The only thing that makes the whole experience less annoying is that BA said they I could spend up 200 on a hotel and they would pay for it later on (after 9 hours of queueing and got told that they couldn't book us a room as they were full), fair enough, so i checked into Hotel Missoni after browsing on TripAdvisor for 5 mins. After I got my room, I was glad that I booked this place, the interior is just what one would expect from the Missoni brand, the bright colour and stripe pattern used on wall and furniture fabric look fabulous. The room is colourful and to me they didn't over do it. It wasn't all just the look, the material that were used in the room were good quality, unlike most chain hotel. However my favourite object in the room was, of course, the Nespresso coffee machine! So during my stay, I spent almost all the time staying in the room watching TV chilling, drinking coffee and emptying the mini bar.
The 5 days getting stuck experience turns out to be rather relaxing, all the stuff i talked to were friendly, for some random reason me and the bartender even had a conversation about AutoCAD... not the kind of stuff that you normally expect to talk about in a bar. 
Now I just hope that I could be `stuck' in a nice hotel everytime my travel plan goes wrong...