It is week 177 and we’re getting back into the swing of weeknotes. The number 177 has several interesting characteristics. 2^7 + 7^2 = 177 making it a Leyland number. There are also several stellar bodies that share their name with week 177, 177P/Bernard is a periodic comet that visits us about every 116 years. Its last appearance was in around this time in 02006, so it will be awhile until it comes back around. 177 is also the name of a dark, main belt asteroid, 177 Irma.
It is summertime in Iceland, but you’d never know from the weather. A summer storm has been hovering over the country all week making it rainy and not every summery.
This week is Landsmót, the largest horse riding competition of its kind. It has been running since 01950 and showcases the breeds, gates, racing and more. Horses are a big part of life in Iceland, even if you are living in the city, it isn’t far to the countryside and everyone knows someone connected to farming and in someway owns a horse.
This week at the office we’ve been combing through the last few emails, news articles and notes we’ve taken over the last few weeks and it is safe to say we’re back on top of things and learnt a lot! It has been a week of mostly getting organized and sending out proposals. A local company is going through a rebranding and we proposed to help them. Everyone has a small, tight budget, but need some external reviewers as a sanity check. We’d be an excellent external evaluator, but so would a lot of other folks as well. The only thing you can do is put together the best proposal explaining why you’re the right company to work with, then they will make their decision – which could be based on many factors you’re not aware of, such as someone on the board’s friend also submitting. Losing a bid doesn’t necessarily mean your proposal was bad, but rather it didn’t fit their needs as well as someone else’s.
Getting new work is a category that isn’t well discussed in industry. There is a lot of hustling and a lot of rejection. Projects are the life-blood of many companies. Besides products, projects are the main way you generate income to keep the company alive to do awesome things.
Recently, a few of our proposals were Yeses, we’d love for all of them to be Yeses, but that is impossible. If you aren’t over-reaching a bit and getting a few Noes, then you are staying too much in your comfort zone.
One of the recent Yeses requires a bunch of writing, consulting and design work. It is a bit of a change because we don’t normally stop there. We get into prototyping and creating the product. They have an in-house team which will do that, they are asking for guidance. So this time the notes and documentation are for others, not us.
We also had an excellent meeting this week with one of our previous partners. They want us to look into resurrecting an old project of theirs and an other project for one of their customers to research and propose ideas some crazy application. We’ve got deep knowledge in for both of these projects which is why they came to us. Hopefully we can connect all the dots and make it happen.
Bric-à-brac
Our surfing this week has brought a few interesting things across our radar. Here are two completely unrelated glass, wood and concrete art works from opposite ends of the globe which are connected via beautiful topology of water.
These are hand made sculptures from glass by Ben Young. The lighthouse and waves was something that interested me. All the stacking of glass layers to create the illusion of water was something so obvious, but we haven’t seen it done before to this affect. His website’s gallery is full of beautiful images of blue waves, the ocean and much more.
The other artist and furniture maker, Greg Klassen uses a glass as well to create topologies and rivers, but in a slightly different way.
Using the natural cracks in the wood, the cuts and the bark to form the river banks is a simple and ingenious use of the natural material.