My Best Friend’s Hair
If you’ve spent a day in Broad Ripple, it’s likely you’ve noticed the abundance of hair salons. With so many options, how do you choose? Enter My Best Friend’s Hair, where consumers can search for stylists based on their criteria (price, specialties, location), and stylists can be found by consumers.

Quipol
Quipol makes it easy to gauge your audience’s sentiment. While not specifically designed for fashion, this flexible tool certainly has a future in it! What better way to explain why, than to show you. Here’s some new glasses I’m considering from Warby Parker (another fashion + tech love story). What say you?

Apparel Media
These guys aren’t from Indy, but with IU as an alma mater and Chicago as their HQ, they’re pretty darn local. What started as a custom apparel printing business, has now transformed into a high caliber solution to help global brands connect with a hyperlocal audience. Companies like AXE have used Apparel Media to get in front of their target (male, 18-24) by co-branding shirts, bundled with product samples or QR-enabled insert cards. (Read more on Forbes)

Roboto Wear
A self described “clothing company with a mechanical heart,” RobotoWear has created a line of robot t-shirts, polos, hoodies and hats, perfect for the tech-minded.

Connect with me to talk fashion (and tech):

• Twitter
• Tumblr
• Svpply

IFC : Fall Trend Report | Image courtesy of Marc McCoy

KA+A recently partnered up with Indianapolis Fashion Collective, in an effort to transform the way that Indy is building its fashion community. The Collective had been operating for a year, hosting special events and creating a member-based network that would support and mentor designers, photographers, stylists, models, and fashion professionals in the city. The big vision was to create a live/work fashion district in the heart of Indy. It was a great start, and the right minds were coming together, but the burden of the dream was growing heavier and not enough people were joining the group to help carry it.

Understanding that in order for fashion to be a noticeable and viable part of Indy’s fabric, KA+A worked with IFC on shaping a new structure, and a new brand to go with it.

We don’t need to convince the city that fashion and a creative class are good for the economy. We need to convince them that enough people in Indiana care about fashion.

Our immediate thought, was to look at Verge, the wildly successful startup tech meetup, that has become a compelling movement for entrepreneurs, investors, developers, designers and more to join. We had the opportunity to work with Matt Hunckler during a re-branding engagement, in which the meetup dropped its Silicon Valley, Hackers & Founders moniker, and forged an original identity – Verge.

What Verge has established is a regular, replicable event that provides space for its members to share ideas and connect to the right people. By facilitating a similar event in the fashion world, our hope is that people would find a business partner, an investment, a new patron, a mentor, a friend, a partner, a retailer, a photographer, a stylist – that people would connect and build things. IFC’s job isn’t to tell them how, but rather, to put all the people in the right room to make things happen in the city.

Individual growth is magnified when it sees itself mirrored in a vibrant community, allowing ideas to organically take root both generally and individually.

With this model in mind, KA+A stripped back member dues, tearing down any hurdles to joining the movement. Instead of chasing down several big projects, we tightened the purpose of the group to curating monthly events that would unite and grow both the consumers and creators of fashion. A feat that could be organized easily by a few people, and often inexpensively with the help of sponsors. Finally, to reflect the new spirit of the group, a new name was given – Pattern. A name that is intrinsically fashion, and also speaks to the recurring events and creating a new mold for fashion in Indy.

When something happens just once, it may be dismissed as an accident . . . but when the same event repeats itself, it is a sign that a deeper historical process is unfolding.- Zizek

Tonight the new Pattern debuts to a sold-out crowd at the IMOCA. A promising start for an inspiring organization that is truly #makingindybetter.

—

Want to meet up with Pattern? Visit meetup.com/pattern.
For fashion editorials, musings and trends, head over to patternindy.com.
Join the fashion conversation at @patternindy.
Like Pattern over on Facebook.

—

A special thanks to our honorary team member, Benjamin Blevins, for his help spearheading the new Pattern identity. All quotes are his, unless otherwise noted!

Do you remember Del.icio.us? Or Delicious as it’s been simplified to today. I’ve been a longtime user now (since ’07). Their simple, but powerful, tagging system immediately became a trusty aid for me to catalog and organize my project management apps, blog inspiration, gift lists, wish lists, wedding, trips, and more. Delicious was a gateway solution for me (and millions of others) to tame the web and cull it according to my personal tastes.

Quickly after joining Delicious, I discovered other, more specialized apps to help me collect & share the web.

First there was Tumblr: a beautiful, engaging, simply designed and very compelling microblogging tool. Links became alive when you could display them as videos, photos or quotes – providing a sort of beauty and depth that Delicious lacked.

Then I found Svpply, a tool to catalog, share and discover things I wanted to buy. I was doing this before on Tumblr, but Svpply makes it so easy to capture the category (clothes, shoes, media, home goods, etc.) and price of a product. And I can follow other users, search their lists, and find new things that match my tastes.

When I recently took a trip to Paris, I signed up for Duffel, a travel app to collect lodging, restaurants, and activities that I was planning for the trip. Only it’s more than a list; coupled with a virtual cork board and Google Map integration, it is a comprehensive dashboard for easily planning your travels.

Then of course there’s Spotify (pre-cursored by Last.fm), which I can use to build playlists that portray my musical personality and share with the world at any moment what I’m listening to.

These are all wonderful tools, and I use them often. But I feel that despite all of these solutions, I’ve lapped back to my original problem: how to organize my corner of the web. My interests, albeit quite a bit more organized now, are still divided at best. And many of them could happily coexist if given the chance.

With the recent rollout of the new Delicious, I had hope. After being sold by Yahoo, Delicious went back into beta to introduce Delicious Stacks – Playlists for the Web. It feels sort of Tumblr-esque. You can create a stack dedicated to a theme, associate photos with your links, and view them in a grid layout. You can share stacks and follow stacks. It’s easy to see how one could turn back to Delicious as a more appealing place to keep your repository.

But there’s too many other specialized traits of Tumblr, Svpply, Spotify and Duffel that I don’t think I could give up. I love Tumblr‘s aesthetic and affinity for fashion; Duffel‘s integration with Google maps is clutch; no one makes it quite as easy to catalog your shopping list as Svpply; and Spotify is a straight up specialist in music. So Delicious Stacks, while I applaud your leap, I’m not sure you’re the answer to streamlining my collections.

When I think of my dream solution, I think of those folks over at Salesforce. They were on to something with their app store – allowing other people, who can satisfy a niche need better, develop that solution and plug it into their platform so their customers can enjoy a single ecosystem. The platform is key.

There’s a “Gang of Four” warring to create this platform. Google owns information, Apple the device, Amazon the cloud, and Facebook the identity. Facebook recently gave us a glimpse of their strategy at the f8 conference: Facebook Timeline. With the promise of “all your apps in one space” it could be just the trick. I’m eagerly awaiting the possibility!

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Last.fm
Founded 2002
Last.fm lets you effortlessly keep a record of what you listen to from any player. Based on your taste, Last.fm recommends you more music and concerts. (Last.fm)

del.icio.us
Founded in 2003
A social bookmarking web service for storing, sharing, and discovering web bookmarks. (Wikipedia)

The Facebook
Founded 2004
A social network where users can create profiles with photos, lists of personal interests, contact information, and other personal information. (Wikipedia)

Polyvore
Founded 2007
Polyvore is a tool that helps you clip, style and share digital collages of products you find while shopping.

Tumblr
Founded 2007
A microblogging platform that allows users to post text, images, videos, links, quotes and audio to their tumblelog, a short-form blog. (Wikipedia)

Spotify
Founded 2008
Spotify is an online music streaming service. Like a growing number of distribution applications, Spotify uses peer-to-peer technology to stream music to its users. (Spotify Forum)

Pinterest
Founded 2009
A vision board-styled social photo sharing website where users can create and manage theme-based image collections. (Wikipedia)

Svpply
Founded 2009
Use Svpply to keep track of the things you want to buy, or browse a personal feed of products from across the web, curated and filtered by the people and stores you find interesting. (Svpply)

Duffel
Founded 2009
Duffel is place to collect your ideas on where to go and what to do while you’re traveling. Comprehensive, centralized trip-planning dashboard – with tools that enable travelers to drag and drop information on lodging, dining and activities from across the Web, get travel inspiration by viewing other members’ public itineraries, and plan group trips involving multiple destination experts. (Duffel)

The New Delicious
Released in 2011
With Delicious you save, stack and share the web. Instantly save your favorite links, collect your discoveries in stacks, share what you find, and dig deeper into your favorite topics. ( Delicious)

Facebook Timeline
Text Released 2011
Timeline is a new way of presenting yourself on Facebook, that dives deep into your past, but also makes your history dynamic while giving apps a new lease on life and works just as well on mobile as it does the desktop. (Gizmodo)

Encouraging experimentation rather than PowerPoint has enabled employees throughout Intuit to move from satisfying customers to delighting them. – Roger Martin

and:

Despite Lady Gaga’s demanding world tour schedule this past fall, her team of seven quietly founded a start-up, the Backplane. The company, which has not yet been unveiled, is a platform meant to power online communities around specific interests, like musicians and sports teams, and to integrate feeds from Facebook, Twitter and other sites. – New York Times

I feel very inspired and light – agile. And although, I feel a bit behind on my tasks, it’s just enough to get my adrenaline rushing so that I can complete them with efficiency. My mind is sharpened and decisive. I’m more human, connected, and vital as I complete my work.

It’s a reminder of the importance to be always-learning, curious, and exploring a depth and breadth of industries, even outside your own. The knowledge does not need to be applied immediately to verify its worth. It is in the trenches with you, and will spring forward when it is called to action.

Since my first post on Fashion and Tech, Gilt Groupe raised an additional $138 million in financing, for a total of $221 million, and commands a present valuation near $1 billion. The “internet gold rush of the east” is official, according to a recent Wall Street Journal article, as “would-be entrepreneurs ditch Wall Street or Madison Avenue careers to set up companies in New York-centric industries such as fashion, retail, finance and media.” You may have heard of other promising young startups from New York, too: Foursquare, Tumblr, SecondMarket, and up and comers Warby Parker, Etsy, GroupMe, and Kickstarter.

The phrase “New York-centric industries such as fashion, retail, finance and media” caught me, particularly as Indy appears to be redefining what sort of industries are central to our own city. As part of its commitment to advance new business and maintain existing businesses, Develop Indy is paying attention to our own high growth IT startups, and perhaps more surprisingly, has recognized fashion and food as emerging industries.

As Indy throttles forward, we are faced head-on with the need to retain native talent, and perhaps more importantly, import new talent. An integral element of a modern employer’s allure is the lifestyle and culture of the surrounding city. Today’s talent isn’t just interested in a good wage; they are just as concerned about the community they are plugging into, inside and out of the office. A recent Indy Star article by Erika Smith corroborates just that:

“Gen Y’ers gravitate toward neighborhoods where they can walk or bike to work, the grocery store, bars and coffee shops…Sharing also is important to them. So is being kind to the environment…After all, we want to have a life, not just a job.”

The resurgence of food as a lifestyle, not just a necessity, is a natural step for our city, so rich in agriculture history and resources. We have amazing access to fresh, local ingredients, and world-class chefs leading the charge, showing us how to fully enjoy Indiana produce. And with the ever quickening rate of new concept restaurants, food trucks, markets, and even farms, the entrepreneurial energy of this (re)emerging industry is alive and well.

However, fashion seems to be something a little harder for us to try on. In fact, Hoosiers are often the brunt of sartorial jokes. So how do we grow this industry? The freshly minted Indianapolis Fashion Collective is trying to do exactly that, as they work to “to Unite, Empower, Showcase, and Grow the Indianapolis area fashion industry through collaboration, education, and awareness… exploring Indy as a fashion destination; marketing and events; mentoring and funding new talent; procuring manufacturing and sourcing for our members and Indianapolis as a whole; and partnerships with the community and other fashion-related businesses.”

As Indy looks at our own strengths, we realize that out of the gate our designers may not be recognized at next year’s CFDA Awards, and we may never have New York’s Garment District. What we do have, is excellence in distribution & logistics and a strong manufacturing base. As shopping online increases, and new store models like Gilt Groupe and Rent the Runway pop up, Indianapolis has a strong bid to handle their logistics: experienced talent, comprehensive & central transportation infrastructure and favorable sales tax structure (that’s how we gained a third center for Amazon). I also think we can look to our IT industry to sweep up the fledgling fashion community in its momentum, especially as the intersection of fashion & tech start to form real pathways. A couple of companies already in this space include: iGoDigital, with its suite of personalization & recommendation tools that allow the in-store experience to be replicated online; and Fifth Gear, who offers pick/pack/ship operations for a variety of industries, including fashion & retail, and ecommerce solutions as well.

As we look at improving our city’s lifestyle through food and fashion, and continue to grow information technology – I look forward to the ideas that abound from cross-pollinating these industries and developing new lifestyle technologies.

Connect with me to talk fashion (and tech):

• Twitter
• Tumblr
• Svpply

Pirates – probably not the first thing that springs to mind when contemplating successful branding. Yet in reality they are responsible for one of the most successful and recognizable identities of all time – the skull and crossbones. In her New York Times article, Alice Rawsthorn writes about the pirates’ adopted emblem and its undoubted success as a branding tool.

Like all brand identities, there are three factors that contribute to the skull and crossbones’ success:

Clarity of Message

Using the skull and crossbones as a visual representation of the outcome of resistance (certain death), pirates found that they could remotely instill fear in target vessels’ crews. This use of visual terrorism would allow the pirates to board ships, take their share, and escape much faster and more efficiently than ever before. Effectively what the flag aided was maximizing profit (booty) while minimizing engagement time (mostly spent fighting resistance), loss of manpower (pirate casualties), and resources (ammunition).

Simplicity

Pirates of the 17th and 18th centuries originally flew plain black flags, but eventually introduced personalized designs to differentiate themselves from other pirate crews (their market competition). The skull and crossbones design as we know it was first sighted in the early 18th century and was adopted by pirates world-wide. The crisp white of the emblem made it stand out from the solid black background, making it clearly visible against any backdrop, and also from long distances – the modern day equivalent of a logo being legible at small sizes for use in print and on-screen.

Versatility

Not all pirates chose to fly the standard insignia. Some didn’t even use it at all, instead choosing to fly a plain red flag to signal an intent to kill without mercy – some say this is the origin of the term “Jolly Roger,” adapted from the French jolie rouge meaning pretty red. Others took to customizing the skull and crossbones, adding additional elements, using rearranging core elements, and even adding color (i.e. blood red) to make their individual messages clear. In some respects that places it alongside Saatchi & Saatchi’s recently revised I Love NY logos, and surely one of the earliest, adaptable, dynamic identity systems.

This week saw the world’s last remaining typewriter manufacturer closed its doors. Despite typewriters being superceded by the personal computer, Godrej & Boyce Manufacturing continued to manufacture them until 2009, when demand saw their production levels drop below 1,000 per year.

Invented in 1870, the typewriter was originally intended for transcribing dictation, eventually becoming the tool of choice for composition used by writers, poets and even philosophers such as Neitzsche, Burroughs, Kerouac, Hemingway and Twain. But alongside its rich history, it leaves behind a legacy of popular terminology and out-dated typographic conventions.

Some common typewriter terminology is still in use today. Backspace, cursor, cut and paste, shift, and tab are all remnants of the typewriter age, each named after the physical acts they describe. While these terms are still appropriate today, the typewriter’s legacy typographic conventions are not.

The reason most of these conventions exist in the first place is because of the typewriter’s physical design. Firstly, there was simply not enough space to house keys for all the different types of quote marks, hyphens, and dashes. Secondly, due to the typewriter’s output being monospaced (each character being exactly the same width), a double-space had to be inserted to be able to clearly distinguish the start and end of each sentence on the page. This resulted the abandonment of proper typographic conventions in favor of a more simplified style. Of course, these days we can use multiple key combinations to access these missing glyphs, and with the advent of digital type with varying character widths, there is no need for double-spaces anymore. You can read more about these conventions, and ways to correct them in my previous posts on Typographic Literacy here and here.

Another legacy of the typewriter is the standard QWERTY keyboard layout. Again, it was because of it’s physical design that this keyboard layout was introduced – its purpose was to increase efficiency by arranging the typebars in an order that minimized key jams during typing. Even the staggered arrangement of keys (which was intended to give the typebars extra breathing room) has made its way onto modern computer keyboards. But again, the physical limitations of the typewriter is no longer an issue. Some alternative keyboard layouts have been nominated such as DVORAK, but despite some apparent advantages (DVORAK puts 70% of the common English keystrokes on the “home row” versus QWERTYs 32%, possibly resulting in reduced risk of carpal tunnel syndrome and other RSIs), none are real contenders to the QWERTY throne.

The typewriter may be dead, but it’s certainly not going to be forgotten any time soon.

Fortunately some typefaces are emerging that make constructing these elements directly within layout applications such as Adobe InDesign much easier. These “Smart Fonts” use Opentype features to allow seamless layering of graphic elements and on-the-fly glyph replacement, the results of which were previously only possible using Adobe Illustrator.

Below are examples of three of these typefaces.

FF Dingbats 2.0

FF Dingbats 2.0 is an evolution of FontFont’s early 1990s pictographic type family. Version 2.0 brings alternate glyphs sets for each pictogram (outlines, fills, and additional details), allowing multi-layering and full color customization. By choosing a specific Opentype feature, the spacing of each glyph is adjusted so they stack perfectly on top of one another. You can read more about FF Dingbats 2.0 here.

Chartwell

Designed by Travis Kochel, Chartwell is a type family designed specifically for producing data visualizations. It works by detecting numeric character combinations and substituting them with custom-designed ligatures. Each substituted ligature is influenced by previously entered values, allowing for seamless pie charts, line charts, and bar graphs. You can find out more about how Chartwell works here.

Wayfinding Sans Symbols

As an addition to his signage design typeface, Wayfinding Sans, type designer Ralf Herrmann has developed a pictographic counterpart. Although it may seem like an ordinary pictographic typeface at first glance, the demonstration video below reveals some ingenious Opentype features. Need a shopping basket icon? No problem. Thanks to Opentype, simply type #shoppingbasket and there it is.

Wayfinding Sans Symbols (Preview) from Ralf Herrmann on Vimeo.

The best part? Although currently in beta testing, the typeface will be released as a free download at fonts.info. You can find out more about Wayfinding Sans Symbols here.

I’m really excited to see what else Opentype can do for type design. I expect to see lots more “Smart Fonts” appearing in the future.

At KA+A we endeavor to make our everyday work our life’s work, by finding roles that require use of our team’s insatiable interests. The work day doesn’t stop at 5pm for us, but that doesn’t mean we’re all trapped behind the desk. Being involved in the community and culture of Indianapolis – whether it’s Verge, IndySpectator, events at the IMA, Pecha Kucha, Triton Brewing Co., or Techpoint – it is just as mission critical, as a brand workshop or building a website. By purposefully cultivating an interdisciplinary lifestyle, we gain a wealth of experience to apply when designing solutions for our clients’ pressing problems.

Following this fashion, I’ve found great direction in the Hemingway approach:

I learned not to think about anything that I was writing from the time I stopped writing until I started again the next day. That way my subconscious would be working on it and at the same time I would be listening to other people and noticing everything, I hoped; learning, I hoped; and I would read so that I would not think about my work and make myself impotent to do it. Going down the stairs when I had worked well, and that needed luck as well as discipline, was a wonderful feeling and I was free then to walk anywhere in Paris.

What Hemingway tapped into, that I find so brilliant, is that he’s not neglecting work; in fact, he admits that it’s always in his subconscious. What he realized though, is that by freeing up his mental faculties to recharge and become inspired, he wards against depleting himself of creative energy, remaining engaged in life and work.

If you’re interested in further guidance for finding your balance, here are a couple of recent resources I’ve found:

• The 99% /a>
• The Sabbath Manifesto

Given the chance to attend one of the IndyTalks, I heard Emily Pilloton, Founder and Executive Director of Project H, speak about her mission to help communities solve problems through design. Project H is a nonprofit organization created to help students (K-12) use design in critical ways to find solutions to challenges they face.

The core foundation of Project H is built on 6 fundamental rules:

• Design Through Action
• Design With, Not For
• Document, Share, and Measure
• Start Locally and Scale Globally
• Design Systems, Not Stuff
• Build

Pilloton’s most recent endeavor, Studio H, is a program that utilizes public education as the avenue to motivate a community through design. The program is based in North Carolina, where Pilloton and her partner, Matthew Miller, teach the students of Bertie County.

Studio H is a yearlong program available for high school juniors that allows students to earn 17 transferable credits to the local community college. It goes far beyond the average art class and is designed to give hands on experience in things like measurement, scale, design software, and shop safety.

The students participate in several projects throughout the year, such as; building a cornhole set, designing & developing chicken coops, and branding a farmers market. Each project offers a different way of viewing a problem and motivates students to find a solution through design.

The perception that design is just an aesthetic element is simply not true. Design is a fundamental way to solve business problems, through innovative solutions.