Month: October 2013

LearningStone and the color blue

Just a short note on progress: LearningStone has been officially launched… no not fully but softly… it’s a soft launch! We are being used by our first client, the Training agency Driestar (thank you for your confidence!) and all is going well. Very well. We’re now looking for more training agencies so please get in touch if you want use LearningStone. It could be free!

Let’s do some adjectives: LearningStone is a private, secure, easy to use, cloud-based, instant, and flexible, beautifully designed… learning and communication tool for trainers and training agencies. More about that here: www.learningStone.com

The color of LearningStone is blue. It’s a purplish blue (actually the exact same color used in the background of Windows 8) but still blue. Why? Well… we will be serving training companies that we don’t want to out-design so we thought going for the most conservative color would solve that.

My working life has been defined by colors starting with a lighter IBM-style blue at the start of ICATT. The first thing my partner Hanneke van der Horst and I did when we officially launched the company (it had been a foundation at the University of Amsterdam) was to move to orange which – back in 1993 – was a pretty radical move. NO company used orange back then. As the years progressed, just about every online-agency thought it necessary to use orange for its house style, so by the time we needed a redesign of our house style we worked together with Visual Space and switched to bright red. When I then started Maximonster Interactive Things, I thought it fun to move to a dark purple (which had been considered together with orange before).

And now I’m back full circle!

23-Oct-13 1-07-02 PM

 

Zwarte Piet

A year ago I was having a video conference with a client in the US. He asked me, a Dutchman, what this was with this Sinterklaas guy, or Sint Nicolas – our version of Santa Clause. He had heard that there were black helpers called Zwarte Piet or Black Peter who were like servants… or perhaps like slaves owned by Sinterklaas. I carefully explained (he was a client after all) that this was a tradition not very different from the elves who help Santa Clause but that I agreed that it had a strong racist undertone. I explained that few… very few Dutch people agree with me that it had anything with racism. No… Zwarte Piet was black because he had to climb down the chimney (so he’s not black but just plain stupid). But what about those big red lips? Eh… well he scrapes his lips along the chimneys…

My client was totally shocked when I showed him images of the streets of Amsterdam with Zwarte Piets (lots of them) running around giving children candy (he’s a nice black guy). And now it turns out that UN investigator Verene Shepherd has started an investigation into the Sinterklaas tradition and is already against it, saying that we should stick to Santa Clause…. Now that’s the worst approach you can take if you want to deal with the Dutch. Now we’ll probably keep Peter black just to show the UN that we have our own mind…
There are people (most Dutch people) that argue that Piet’s blackness is a tradition that we shouldn’t spoil but the time has come for us to accept that the racist undertones are offensive to many people and that – as history has shown – it’s really not such a problem to adapt a historical character. All you have to do is consider which part of the history, of the story we can easily change without changing the plot. I discussed this with a black friend and we agreed that changing Sinterklaas into a black guy (on a black horse!) would be hard to explain away and would be just plain silly but that many details of the whole tradition could easily be changed. The solution would be to not only add colored Piets* to the celebration but also white ones. And then we can leave the tradition alone for a while as we love Sinterklaas and Zwarte… eh… colored Piet. We certainly refuse to give up Sinterklaas all together which would be giving in to American pressure as we all know that Santa Clause is actually Sinterklaas after he got a full make over last century, sponsored by Coca-cola.