-
Branding musafir.com
Work from Musafir.com on April 27, 2011
Musafir.com was founded in August 2007 and branded over a three month period from December 2007 to February 2008. Although some brands begin by identifying their structure and then hunt for a name that fits the profile, we jumped right into word formation exercises.
I began by running through a list of every possible combination involving the words travel and trip under the sun; however, with most meaningful English dot-coms snapped up, our choices were whittled down to absurd names or obscure TLDs.
It was then that I came across the word musafir (pronounced /mʊ saː fIr/). Unlike the others, this dot-com was available, even if so for a ransom. The word meant traveler in Arabic, Hindi and Urdu, and was practically a part of popular culture in the subcontinent, thanks to a song from the seventies.
We traded our bag of silver for the domain in September 2007 and I worked on the brand through to the end of February 2008, which you can read about on The incredible Brandini. If there was one challenge worth noting, it was our wordmark, which had to be redrawn because of Meta’s awkward ‘fi’ ligature and the unusual balance of characters in Musafir. Our golden wings too only came about after 128 iterations involving everything from sunshine to shooting stars.Although there have been a few tweaks in shade over the years – the most recent being in September 2010 – nothing has fundamentally changed about the brand since March 2008. It’s served us well as a startup and we’re looking to build on top of it for a new product this summer. In the posts that follow, I’ll share more about how Musafir.com was designed and the hurdles that e-business startups have to overcome in the Middle East.
-
Screen-frei-days
Thoughts about Life on April 2, 2011
Anyone who knows me well will tell you that I ought to have had my photograph pasted alongside the entry for ‘workaholic’ in the Oxford dictionary years ago. We compete with our classmates as children, burn midnight oil trying to outwit entire campuses as teenagers and bask in the glory of eighteen Watt fluorescent tubes to take on the world as adults.
I did it all to the tee, and that’s when I happened to stumble across Susan Maushart’s winter of disconnect in an article shared ironically through a tweet. For six months in 2009, she and her children unplugged everything with a screen. They began to read the newspaper, her son rediscovered his saxophone, they went to the movies and her daughters even co-wrote a novel.
While I couldn’t afford the luxury of a winter of disconnect at the risk of running an e-commerce business by paper, I could afford at least one day a week without a screen. I picked my Fridays and christened them screen-frei-days, although they sometimes spill over to Saturdays. ‘Frei’ may seem a bit formal – it’s German for free – but it has a better ring to it than screen-free-days.
In the last three months alone, I’ve rediscovered my love of writing, picked up where I left off on barre chords and begun to read twice as much in print – the last, more for typographic gratification than the fact that it doesn’t involve a screen. It’s funny how after waging a battle against print media for your entire career – and let’s be honest, it’s an unspoken part of every online advertiser’s induction – that I’ve realized I’m far happier reading works in print.
If you’ve never had a winter of disconnect or wished you had the time to rediscover all those failed new year resolutions, it’s never too late to discover your own screen-frei-day.
-
Wind tower at sunset
Photographs of Dubai on August 6, 2010
-
The photographer’s shadow
Photographs of Dubai on August 6, 2010
-
Viva la revolución
Thoughts about The Internet on June 27, 2009
Change is never easy. The rights we take for granted today were sown by people who believed in their cause so passionately that they would huddle under the shimmer of moonlight at risk of life and limb to bring about change. Of course, things have come a long way since then. First there was email, then blogs and now micro blogs.
I’ve been on email since 1997 and written this blog since 2006, but I have to admit that I’ve never quite felt as empowered to build support for change as I have since I began tweeting earlier this month. If you don’t believe me, start by asking yourself a simple question – how many times have you wanted to drop an anvil on your computer in frustration or go out on to the streets in protest, but just couldn’t convince yourself or couldn’t, period?
Those are the exact questions the people of Iran and the Email Standards Project asked themselves this month – and they did something about it. By encouraging people to voice their opinions on twitter, these two campaigns successfully built support for change. In fact, you too can join the revolution by simply tweeting about something you’re passionate about. For example, you can start by telling Microsoft to fix Outlook 2010 before it’s too late or wake up to find all those great looking emails charred in your mailbox in 2011.
