If you use Google as your homepage like I do, then you get to enjoy the different “special occasion” Google logos. Each year for the past 4 years, Google has had a competition for school age kids to design a Google logo around a theme. This year, the theme is “What if…?”
Over 16,000 kids entered a logo, and now the public can vote on the 40 finalists, evenly divided by age group. The national winner will be displayed on the Google homepage on May 22. In addition to the prestige of having their artwork chosen to be nationally displayed, the National Winner will win a $10,000 college scholarship to be used at the school of their choice, a trip to the Googleplex, a laptop computer, and a t-shirt printed with their doodle. Google will also award the winner’s school a $25,000 grant towards the establishment/improvement of a computer lab. The other 3 National Finalists will win a trip to the Googleplex, a laptop computer, and a t-shirt printed with their doodle.
The City of Raleigh currently is updating its Comprehensive Plan for the first time since 1989. Over the next 20 years, the city is expected to grow by 70 percent and reach a population of 700,000. Kids City is one element of the City’s strategy to educate people on the issues and engage them in envisioning Raleigh’s future.
Emma Farquhar sees the future clearly, complete with flying cars, the river all Raleighites long for, and her house in the trees.
Kids have eco-visions too! Check out “The Solar Hotel!”
The Mudcats stadium moves downtown, and all the important people of Raleigh are there enjoying the game.
Industry moves downtown too. Shown here is a Gatorade factory…and right beside it, there’s a chocolate factory. Chocolate and Gatorade…new energy for the downtown core!
You can always count on kids for the big ideas, the creative avenues we all wish for but are afraid to develop. Kids Day 2030 brought a little fun into the idea of planning - and maybe to the future reality of Raleigh.
As some of you may know, Gamil puts a lot of resources into creating SparkCon. It’s a conference and showcase of local talent, and one of our biggest distractions! The conference goes out of its way to help let the world know the wide variety of artists, musicians, technologists, and thinkers in the Triangle area. One of the special parts of SparkCon is the FashionSpark component, which has jeans designers share the runway with piercing artists and doggy couture.
It was 5pm on Tuesday, voting day, and Aly and I were out the door to vote. But as we were getting ready to leave, Joey got the inside scoop that “in 15 minutes, Barack Obama is gonna be down at The Raleigh Times!”
Ooooooooh, serious ethical dilemma here. What do we do? Do we VOTE for a potential future president or do we SEE a potential future president? Ultimately, we hedged our bets and drove to the polls first, hoping everyone else had already voted and lines would be short (they were!!) and then we raced back to The Times hoping Obama would still be there (he was!!)
When we got to The Times, at least half of Designbox was already in prime gawking positions. After waiting it out for 20-30 minutes, we all got to see Obama, most of us shook his hand (including me!), and our friend Claire even got his autograph. The biggest story was that Ty got slightly manhandled by the secret service because he had one of his hands behind his back. Oops.
Barack Obama loves someone near Beth
Barack Obama loves someone near Aly
Barack Obama loves Claire and Claire loves us so Barack Obama loves us!
Following sustainable design, I have been a fan of Nau. It is a great example of how sustainable design can be sexy. Borne of some of the more progressive, corporate minds in outdoor gear, I thought they stood a good chance of fusing a green focus with an innovative business model.
They did have pretty compelling stores, although a bit austere for my taste. Actually they were more like showrooms than stores, and encouraged visitors to receive chosen merchandise via mail rather than taking it with them.
The reasoning was that inventory and fuel costs of maintaining in-store inventory was more expensive than fulfilling from a mail-order model. You got a substantial discount for doing it (10%?) but it was off-putting, too. Clothing is too personal and impulsive of a purchase to receive a week later in a box.
A central theme to Nau’s work was their Partners for Change program where 5% of every sale was donated to a charity on the Nau menu. You could select with reasonable specificity where your 5% would go.
Unfortunately I think this diluted their message of sustainable fabrics, which was really where their innovation trumped the rest of the market. They used organic cottons, recycled polyesters that were super cool looking, and also PLA - a fabric made from corn fibers.
Despite their passing, I’m inspired by their attempts and we’d be fools to not try to learn from Nau. They have exposed an amazing amount of their corporate DNA, and have maybe pointed the way to do things. I think one lesson I draw from Nau is not to rely on huge fundraising stages. Perhaps the way to develop a sustainable business is to not rely on receiving a steroidal $30+ million from over-eager investors, but to grow slow and organically.
Looking for gmail? You may have arrived here by misspelling Gmail. We understand. Typing fast isn't our strongest skill - hee hee. We've been here and online for about 8 years longer than Gmail, but the gamil/gmail phenomenon has brought us many many new visitors. So we changed our home page to a blog in hopes of "meeting" some of you passers-by. Feel free to hang out here for a while.
May 12, 2008 
Tags: , Art, Creativity, google, graphic design, kids 
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