It is a fascinating talk about design, passion, rebelion, ignorance and flaws that goes very much in line with Henry Ford and Steve Jobs, only the wording is so very different that some of you I’m sure may think I’m weird to think that they have got something in common. Anyhow, I believe that is the case.
One more post on design which I love very much. I post it for you Elisabeth, the Great 
With a career that fuses rock and roll, corporate identity creation, and impressionistic geography, Paula Scher is a master conjurer of the instantly familiar.
… and Steve Jobs quoted by me …
»We can’t go out and ask people on the street or in focus groups, what is the next big thing? There’s a great quote by Henry Ford, right? He said, “If I’d have asked my customers what they wanted, they would have told me: A faster horse.” «
Jobs can find passionate people like him to work for him. Jobs talks to the need for passion in addition to smarts, »They have to be really smart. But the real issue for me is, are they going to fall in love with Apple? Because if they fall in love with Apple, everything else will take care of itself.« There needs to be love.
Source: Innovation Playground
On January 26th the Chinese celebrate the New Year. Then starts the the Year of the Cow. Our whole business relies on cows, therefore 2009 is a very special year for us. Elisabeth, my wonderful designeressa , has been in Styria, Austria (the homeland of Arnold Schwarzenegger) this weekend and met a cow of gigantic dimensions.
The Ponterosa, our favorite »Beisel« (eatery) in Hard by the lake. (Lake of Constance, Austria). A harmonic place all over, from the outside as you can see here and from the inside. You have to test it when come there …
Ponterosa before the arrival of the crowd
After I was getting unhappily involved into the controversial hollowness of branding listening to Rob Forbes feels like a relief. His photos show the patterns of beauty in real life, in the public space far away from the dogma of recognition, yet so familiar, abstract and touchable in the same time.
Rob Forbes founded Design Within Reach, the furniture company that brought high design to the general public.
Today, when most people have returned back to work after a long Christmas holiday, I myself feel urged to change my working speed back to normal and give more attention to my blog posts again as well. I picked up a post on the designobserver blog this morning about branding that reviews the book »Obsessive brand disorder«, by Lucas Conley .
I do not want to add a comment to this review. I want to just give our perspective on this fluffy issue that escapes substantiality so fast. Right from the beginning when we started our biestmilch business in 2000 to create a brand was one of our major aims. During these years we learned many lessons, but interestingly not those ones we were told by the experts of marketing (we have been strongly advised not to use the product name »biestmilch«).
We don’t follow branding as formal design oriented process, we left he dogma of the much fuss about recognition under which wild mixtures of opinions, predilections, ideologies, philosophies, aesthetics, ethics and morals are boiling. We try to tell the biestmilch story as consistent and exciting as possible, we sometimes also do things that by the rule shouldn’t be done.
Whether a powerful man or women will one day call biestmilch a brand is like many other things left to the uncertainty of future … and whether our targeted audience/customer or an unexpected other one will accept or better receive us as a brand lies beyond our control.
I think there is a big difference between »doing branding« or talking about branding (to write a scientific paper or book about this topic may be interesting but has to avoid a lot of pitfalls not to become a propaganda oeuvre in many ways).
Branding is a relational thing among …. ???? I avoid the answer because the pitfalls are opening immediately!
If you do branding in the wild as we do, you try to anticipate, observe and analyze on the one hand, on the other you have to be passionate, assured and persuasive. Whether we reach our goal, is not up to us to judge. We can only observe our sales figures.
Wiesbaden gehört zu den wärmsten Gebieten in Deutschland. Umso erstaunlicher ist dieser fantastische Wintereinbruch. Kaltes trockenes Wetter, traumhaft 
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Since 20 years we experienced the coldest morning in Germany, -29,1°C was the lowest measured temperature. I walked out Sophie, my border terrier girl early this morning and it had -13°C. I was moving fast and I was dressed warm, too warm, after 20 minutes only I was sweating. Between the outside and my inside a temperature difference of round about 51°C . The Body, what an enigma of regulation.
