How we manage a zero waste business.

How do we create zero waste? Well essentially everything is either composted or recycled. What little food scraps that are left (after our two ravenous greyhounds have eaten that is) are composted into the garden that surrounds our house.

Paper, glass, steel and aluminium cans are recycled by our local council. Printer cartridges and batteries are recycled at special drop off points.

The ash from our fireplace is actually sieved by hand and then goes back into improving the quality of our soil. The few things that can’t be recycled are sold to be repaired on ebay (for example broken electronic components).

We put rusty nails around the base of our lemon tree. Since we did that our lemons have improved enormously! Anything else is broken down into its component materials and sorted.

We also do this by thinking ahead about what we buy and what we’ll do with it at the end of its useful life. It’s not easy. We try not to purchase new electronic devices to start with because we have learned that these are the most difficult to recycle (and they don’t last very long, planned obsolescence and all that).

Yes it does take some extra work sorting our ‘waste’ stream, but we think this is the future, that this is how it should be. Everything has its place.

Successful brands have brand guidelines.

Lufthansa online brand style guidelines

Here are the Lufthansa logo guidelines for example. Guidelines for the use of icons. Illustration guidelines. More technical illustration guidelines. Infographics guidelines. Then they have a colour style manual. A typeface and typography guidelines. Interior, product and industrial design brand guidelines. Motion design guidelines.

All of this creates a unified brand so that Lufthansa Group’s 110,065 employees have an identical vision.

But it’s not just Lufthansa. It’s Qantas. British Airways. Starbucks. Uber. NASA. Twitter. Switzerland has a style guide. Al Jazeera has a style guide. The London underground has a style guide. Sony has a style guide. Ericsson has a style guide. 3M has brand guidelines. Microsoft has a style guide.

Introducing the logobrain logo.

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logobrain logo

We’d like to present our new logo to you. This was not our first logo design, rather, it’s our latest one. Because what does a logo designer do when they need a logo? They scratch their head. They put it off. They design logos for everyone else but themselves.

But our gut feeling told us that after all this time we ourselves needed a logo. Should we hire a logo designer or attempt to design it ourselves? Eventually we realised this is what we do, so we did it. We hope you like it as much as we do. We hope to see you around here more often. Thanks for reading.