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Heated swimming pool, the most delicious cakes to round off an afternoon spent swimming and tanning in the loungers, lunch buffet, excellent service, a nicely sized gardens with various rodents... It feels like being on relaxing holiday even for a few hours..

Have a buffet lunch, morning breakfast, afternoon tea or evening cocktail at the terrasse.. you might even spot a celebrity or two!

Mount Nelson website

Nothing like pizza as far as the eye can see on a Friday afternoon :)

We have experienced severe problems with Nationwide in the connection with the airlines reservationssystem for several months now.
For our customers this means that you see a fare on our website that we retrieve from the airline and when you try to book it the price and seat is not avalable.

This causes frustration amongst all of us.
We have talked to Nationwide about the problems. They have not really reacted, so we decided a couple of weeks ago, to turn Nationwide off from our systems. Until further notice Nationwide is therefore not available on Travelstart.co.za

Press release:

South Africa's top online travel agency, Travelstart.co.za, has acquired Irrational Studios, an innovative branding and user experience design consultancy.

Since its launch in South Africa in August last year, Travelstart has achieved unprecedented success and was recently rated by Alexa.com - the Amazon.com web-traffic ranking report - as one of the most popular South African online travel agencies.

Irrational Studios was founded by Damian Stephens, former Creative Director of Ogilvy Interactive and Tinderbox. With designer Anne-Sophie Leens, he began working on the Travelstart account last year.

"Travelstart is the most innovative online business in South Africa.
The opportunity to establish a branding and user experience design
division within such a company was too good to pass up as there is
unlimited scope for us to do meaningful work. By establishing this
division Travelstart are sending out a message that user experience is at the core of their business. It's great for both parties" said Stephens.

Business administration within the two companies has been streamlined and the team works closely with Travelstart founder Stephan Ekbergh.

User experience design (UX) is a relatively unknown discipline in
South Africa. Its aim is to make websites useful, usable, desirable,
valuable, findable, accessible and credible. For Ekbergh, UX
contributes to the bottom line and improves customer satisfaction.

Transactional travel websites are particularly challenging as large
amounts of potentially complex information must be displayed in a way that makes it simple to understand and use.

Ekbergh sparked an e-travel revolution in Scandinavia in the mid-90s when he launched his first travel website. Travelstart is now one of the leading online travel agencies (OTA) in the Nordic region and is fast becoming an industry leader in Europe and the Baltics.

The Cape Town based team at Irrational Studios recently completed
re-branding the business both locally and internationally. They are
currently working on numerous new projects including a comparative car hire system, an alternative travel search system, and a social
software program that will enable travellers to connect and share
their experiences. "These programs are designed to promote client
retention and increase organic search rankings" said Stephens.

UX is a key element in the success of the Travelstart websites. "We're
helping fulfil Travelstart's promise of being the simplest way to find and book the best travel deals" concluded Stephens.

Our latest newbies are Melanie, left, and Ruqaiyah, right.

They start today and will be a great asset to our customer service team.
They start as junior consultants and both come from some of our offline colleagues.

Welcome ladies. Glad to have you here.

Wow,, what a Design Indaba 10! Possibly the most inspiring so far,, Thanks to Travelstart, Damian, Tara and myself spent an amazing inspiring 3 days of conferences by graphic designers, product designers, architects, futurists, artists trend spotters and cartoonists.

The standing ovations:
- Massimo and Lella Vignelli
" I like design to be semantically correct, syntactically consistent, and pragrmatically understandable.

I like it to be visually powerful, intellectually elegant, and above all timeless"
Massimo Vignelli.
I think that sums it all.. His work includes graphic and corporate identity programs, publication designs, packaging, architectural graphics, exhibition, interior, furniture, and consumer product designs for many leading American and European companies and institutions. By timeless, I mean that American Airlines hasn't gone through a single rebranding since their birth! As he said himself, you can't get more american than that logo!

Mr. Vignelli’s work has been published and exhibited throughout the world and entered in the permanent collections of several museums.
Absolutely amazing energy and love for beautiful design!
http://www.vignelli.com

- Zapiro
Activist cartoonist.
I didn't know this but when he first started, he had to go into hiding because of one of his cartoon. He's been making very pertinent comment about the political state of South Africa, always sticking to his gun and conveying his messages with wit and guts.
http://www.mg.co.za/zapiro/default.aspx

- Jaime Hayon
Follows his heart,, after a research internship at Fabrica, Jaime went on to draw what was in his head. He learned the craft of porcelaine and turned his drawing into real life real size objects and exhibited these crazy landscapes made of soni pigs and weird cactuses. Some bathroom company spotted him and asked him to draw a sink. Which led him to bath tubs, lamp shades, tables and other products. We absolutely love him because he's been following his heart, doing stuff only for fun and to learn, not because he had to. So much energy and fun, yay Jaime!! (Tara's favourite).
http://www.hayonstudio.com


- Keith Helfet (from South Africa) went from building car body in plaster in his garage to designing the most amazing cars for Jaguar. Emotional design sells. Jaguar received several blank cheques for a car not even in production, all because of his desirable design... Design sells!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_Helfet
Jaguar webite

- Allistair King from ad agency King James in Cape Town told designers to use their skills for themselves, not just for others. He also highlighted what his designers do in their spare time and pointed out that having several businesses / passions in the go help balancing oneself and keep motivated and inspired. I'm off starting my own CC only for "work of love", thanks Alistair!
http://www.kingjames.co.za/

Even though their presentations might not have been as entertaining as the more demonstrative speakers, I really enjoyed my favourite product designers' talks and seeing them for real. I've been trying for a while to get other people to buy me products designed by Jasper Morrison for example.. and hearing his thoughts and approachs made his products even more desirable!
http://www.jaspermorrison.com/


- Tobias Frere-Jones from the legendary Hoefler & Frere-Jones foundry, designs typefaces. His amazing journey of legibility and meaning research made us look at legibility and meanings differently. He then explained how and why he designed a typeface used to display stock shares in a newspaper, increasing legibility and use of space. Absolute God!
Hoefler & Frere-Jones


Cameron Sinclair really blew my socks off too. I saw him in a TED talk podcast a few weeks ago so it was nice to sit in front of this guy for real :)
He's the founder of Architecture for Humanity, a charitable organization which promotes architecture and design solutions to humanitarian crises and provides design services to communities in need. He's working in 9 countries in projects ranging from school building, tsunami and hurricane reconstruction to developing medical facilities in Sub-Saharan African. What really shocked me is that this guy, with the help of designers world-wide, is helping and rebuilding communities way faster than the UN and other similar organisations. He also achieves this for a lesser cost. Most importantly, he involves the communities he works with, which a lot of help projects don't seem to do.

"Design like you give a damn!"

http://www.architectureforhumanity.org/

Last but not least, Brian Eno. Unfortunately we couldn't assist to the entire talk due to my music video being premiered at the same time as his talk but I would love him to be my art mentor and having philosophical discussions with him about the meaning of it all!
http://www.enoweb.co.uk/


For photos and more, check out the Design Indaba website.

Thanks Stephan, we absolutely loved it!!

We seem to find our ways into all kind of interesting media. Last week we were in Femina.

This week we found ourselves in Woman and Home. Excellent news!

According to our findings women are the decision makers in 60% of all travel purchases.