David Lemayian

Pen and Paper vs Digital

I have been racking my brain over this for a long time now and the conclusion: Pen and Paper. Why? Well I don’t have the writing prowess of Carl Natale and how brilliantly he puts it in this article: Pen & Paper: Better Than All Things Digital so I am going to add to it.

I too am a geek. A serious one at that. I have a myriad of gadgets and are often (always) online. I believe and always believed technology will do for humanity a great deal of good. And it has. It has provided for higher productivity, more opportunities and vast means of receiving and sharing information. I love all the nifty things people have created and in particular to this post, Evernote. With easy access to my notebooks across platforms, I enjoy watching my notes grow whenever I’m infront of a screen.

Then there is my Moleskine. Black, hard cover and ruled. It feels good to the touch and exciting to write on. The paper is heavy enough to tell the quality apart from normal notebooks and the glide of the pen feels natural. But I can’t run a search query on it. I can’t, years from now, visualize my notes and do some amazing analysis on words I have used. Also the ever so useful spellchecker. Not to say I have horrible spelling but I am sort of a perfectionist. Being able to automatically keep tabs on my minor spelling errors does my inner peace a favour. With my Moleskine, I am my own spellchecker.

So why not stick to digital? I have used Evernote for a while now, tested a few other apps\platforms and even taken to Google Docs (now Drive) to get up to scratch with writing and note taking but nothing comes close to putting it down on pen and paper. The simplicity of it all is a breath of fresh air from the complexity of text formatting, drop down menus and the save\sync buttons. It allows my mind to focus on the writing and not the extra space I might have accidentally included. Or the flashing notifications of new emails or system\application updates required.

Sometimes we complicate our lives more than it needs to be. Pick up a notebook today and write something. Anything. It will change your life.

And as an extra, [video] What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains:

Kenyan Flag Shield Design - Geometric circles

When Twitter launched its new logo that followed geometric circles, I thought it was pretty cool! Since I was a kid, I used to take out of my geometry set the compass and draw endless amounts of circles criss-crossing each other. It helped with the endless, boring classes.

Today I figured I could give the shield on our beloved Kenyan flag a try with the same idea. Check out the process below:

1. First the shield’s outer boundary

2. Then the inner art work elements

3. Inner sides (left and right) art work elements and middle circle

4. Finally some colour :)

And there you have it. The Kenyan flag’s shield with geometric circles.