I rode the Indie home and to places around WF for the past few days. Took the scooter to regular-mundane daily tasks and took it on dedicated test-rides in the night after the traffic thinned. (The photo looks like a potato-quality spyshot but that is just because I am awkward at taking photos in public. Even when it is early in morning and the only three people outside the chicken stall are more interested in other more pressing everyday stuff. R couldn’t take pictures because of the hurt leg and we are left with this crappybara I’m constantly apologising for. I even had to content-aware-fill the eff out of a piece of crumpled newspaper somewhere in the bottom left corner. See the bird-droppings on the seat above the pannier mounts? That is how ‘stock’ the vehicle was running. We’ll fix all this soon. Let R get well soon.)

The scooter rides really well, planted to the ground as if it were a car with nice suspension. (Reminds me of podimol in many nice ways.) The last time I felt this amount of ride-refinement was with the Thunderbird 500 back in GurgaonOfTheFlatRoads[1]. Like all EVs, the torque is instant and it is fun to make the motor spin up on open roads. (The whine is divine.) The range anxiety is real (started most of my rides with under 50% charge and that is not a nice thing to have running in one’s mind or flashing in the instrument cluster) and reenacting the charging sequence reminded me of trying to memorise a particularly longwinded hydrocarbon in class twelth. That—despite how my marksheets turned out—is not a memory I’m particularly interested in revisiting everytime the chariot runs out of juice.

The Indie is a beautiful machine with a lot of well-intentioned details. We’re working on the second version of a small part on the vehicle and it is nice to see assumptions from version one fail faced with the three-dimensional experience of riding the Indie and having to charge it at the shared bays in the HQ parking lot. Looking forward to making some small significant (and above all, friendly) improvements soon.

I also did some impulsive helmet buying. Unlike my usual matte black-grey-white-with-stripes palette, this one is ‘colourful’ to say the least. R was surprised and went on to say she doesn’t recognise me anymore. I know she wasn’t talking about the second (tinted) visor-lette having come down over my grin-painted face. But the point remains noted.

There was a particularly busy traffic situation near Brookfield where I stopped next to an RE (a Bullet 350 with the golden 3D logo on the tank; not the retrofitted abomination that passes for decals at RE these days[2]). It was nice. Was happy and talked to R about it when the traffic situation let me get home sunburnt.

In other news, showed myself the proverbial door at the current temporary office this morning (before getting thrown out ceremonially perhaps; my ego wouldn’t have been able to take that fall after all the serendipitous traffic-light spotting of beziers). Looking for a tea-break friendly room and working from home till that materialises. After all these years wringing pixels behind oddly angled screens held together with velcro and bulldog clips (and sheer force of will to continue making a reasonable enough living), a proper workspace is something I’ve come to care the most about (after certain other things in life, ofc) and it is not okay to compromise. There was something that S wrote about that I wanted to discuss here. Will soon. Context.

There is a lot of work to finish. Some of it is exciting. Some of that exciting work is tweaking carpet designs in the middle of the day and tweaking them again much later. Some of that exciting work is mundane out of context but take a lot of patience and craft. (Like putting vehicle loan options and terms and EMIs in handout-friendly A5 cards. Or a 3-by-9 cm newspaper ad for hiring store staff. This last one I had so much fun with.) We are looking for capital G graphic design people to help do some of that boring/tedious work that needs an unsustainable level of attention to detail, fairly advanced typography/gestalt chops, and a lot of empathy and humility. If this sounds like I’m trying to glorify tedium and perfectionism and all those ideals that usually work against people having a life, apologies. I have heard what Carson had to say about graphic design saving the world. Also read this Nick Asbury essay on ‘purpose’ and fully agree. None of this work is ‘noble’ in itself but are good opportunities to manipulate form and order in service of someone’s experience. (Send in a PeeDeeYeff CV via hello-at-kl11-dot-in if still interested. Know that we expect a significant amount of fundamentals-in-place-ness and an unconditional willingness to work on many many many versions of things; we too do this. We also pay fairly well while being sufferable bosses.)

1: The difference is that I did not want to get one for myself immediately then, given how smitten I was with the Classic with the upswept silencer.

2: I wonder how the current B350 tank graphic even passed the basic-est of reviews. Can hear Mr. D grind his teeth everytime one enters my line of sight. I believe crapfest is the most family freindly technical term to describe that waste of materials and space. Like how a friend’s new boss describes stuff, I must start saying ‘shambolic’ and ‘gargantuan’ and suchlike.

Cake Day

R completed another round of running-around-the-sun. We had a slow day with her friend dropping by with cake #2 (unexpected, unexpected place, etcetra) that made it quite special, some nice food at this quiet-ish two-storey food-complex finished in exposed bricks and cement and littered with wire-backed chairs in yellow and blue, and some harmless IKEA web browsing for artificial plants. We played some Snakes&Ladders (she won). We also made some art away from the screens. Here is what I started off with.

The birthdaywoman did not approve the first one fully so I moved on to this (it says ae-bee-see-dee in Malayalam). Cleaned up, whitebalanced etcetera.

R made a portrait of me. I am going to take it to the HQ and show it off on the desk.

She had a ligament tear some weeks ago—distracted by Chelgato getting into a car—and walks in pain. Hoping things turn out okay soon.

Other (Work) News

Work is harsh and fun. Store #2 is on, signage project is on, web is off (should be on). On Friday I picked Pantone shades for some tintsandshades from the brand palette for River and topped them off with corresponding-ish AsianPaints Cosmos swatches with fun (?) names. By the end of it I couldn’t tell red from orange so just focused on what was needed ASAP.

New neighbours at the ID Studio. Good conversations and sharing references.

We need more people to steer this graphic-design ship, clearly. If you know someone who knows the only right way to align monospaced type and whose filenaming game is chefskiss awesome, please ask them to come meet us online.

Technologee

Ordered one of these in white (darth was out of stock). Binepad is an Indian startup from Haryana; the person at the other end of their phone number was nice enough to run me through basics and share a discount code. They also sent me a nice little machined aluminium tray with the order. More on all that after I have a chance to work with it at the Cintiq.

I am not reading enough. Another K-ink device died its untimely death and I find it really hard to justify throwing another 12K at something that is going to go the ghost-touch way in a year. Also need to visit Blossoms soon; it is almost illegal at this point to say I’m in Bangalore and I haven’t been to the big B yet.

KL11-10

This deserves its own post. We have been at this for ten years! Almost all of it is thanks to M managing the stuff so well and keeping the standards high up when it comes to work. The rest thanks to great clients and folks we work with. We had a small (surprise for M and I) gathering with great friends and tasty food. It was overwhelming and fun. We may do something of our own, later if everything works out well. Fingers firmly crossed.