In early 2010 the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art celebrated its 75th anniversary with a showcase of standout art and design. There I discovered vintage typewriters and the graphics that with them, and found I was in love. There were evocative Olivetti posters and strange, elegant typewriters from the 50s and 60s—Marcello Nizzoli designs and a fire-engine red ‘portable’ Valentine by Ettore Sottass.

Sottsas intended the Valentine “for use any place except in an office, so as not to remind anyone of monotonous working hours, but rather to keep amateur poets company on quiet Sundays in the country or to provide a highly coloured object on a table in a studio apartment.”

The Valentine was the typewriter made object of desire by pop design and inspired marketing—an association-driven name, a place on the shelves of upscale fashion houses, and a sophisticated poster campaign from the man and the company—Olivetti—who had employed writers, graphic artists, and advertising specialists from as early as 1930.

The lovely folks at the Powerhouse Museum have with them some much older specimens, among them a Blickensderfer 5 from 1893. The Blick 5 was light and inexpensive, and was the first truly portable machine with a full keyboard—an ancestor to the Powerbooks gathering in cafes from Brooklyn to Surry Hills.

As for love and typewriters, a few months later a good friend appeared at my house with a hard case of a curious shape, and with a bow about its handle. It was a dusky cyan Olivetti Lettera 32, the model that, despite the industrial good looks of the iconic Valentine, I’d loved the most (but had not said).

We love creative events around Sydney, so it was with great joy to go through the Creative Sydney 2010 newsletter which popped into my inbox this morning!

Being a mapping nut, I’m particularly interested in Networks + Clusters, and Creative for a Cause, and Technology + Behaviour for some socially-conscious food-for-thought.

Which look good to you?

Also check out Vivid Sydney 2010. Last year, Creative Sydney 2009 was a part of the same series of events as Vivid Sydney 2009, which we did the website for last year, along with our friends Toben.

Yesterday we organised another of our monthly workshops. Varied topics were presented and discussed.

• Brett presented his learning experience during his internship at the IxC.
• I presented ways for boosting one’s productivity with text expanding, apple scripts and automations.
• Thomas and Brett showcased some cool features respectively from the LESS CSS framework and Coffee script.
• George proposed ways for including javascript libraries into reusable Django applications.
• Greg organised a fun game, based on index cards and “rock-paper-scissors”-style plays, for the agile estimation of feature implementation. This is something we’re actually (seriously!) about to implement in some of our biggest client projects.

Those workshops are a great way for the team to share knowledge and good tips and to stay on the edge of all the cool things out there. We’re planning to make them public at some stage, so stay tuned!