And my blogging journey ends here

That’s the end for all the rants and talks on this blog. This is probably the last blog post on this site. The last ten days have been very hard at this end. The last ten days have been the toughest all around, and this blog had a hand in that(content, mostly the rants and the controversy) I wish I had cleared it out in terms and conditions style of a page saying that “my views do not necessarily represent my firm–dots and lines”. This is the last one.

I’d like to take a tiny moment over here to thank you all for the page-views, and the comments. All of you who are subscribed through your feed-readers, and all who keeps e-mailing. Believe it or not, dotone is two years old now, but that’s its sky.

Saleh

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And back, Hydra, lost in translation

Back with lots of rants, lots of new experiments, News and dots and lines updates. Let’s get rollin’. In the last three weeks I had to visit Dubai more than seven times. And every time I did, I looked at Hydra Properties adverts and kept thinking who’d make such an awful English slogan translated from an Arabic s-lang, yet a cool Arabic slogan. “?????? ?? ??????” is the Arabic slogan–meaning “It’s about being different”. The English slogan is “The idea of being different” which is a word-by-word translation of the Arabic slogan.

So everytime I go down to Dubai I get to pick on some logo or some advert. Outta’ hand. It’s so easy to spot and reverse-engineer a logo design. Here’s the scenario with Hydra, 90% probability of being right!

The Scenario

Hydra has no real image to portray in the market, being a late entrant in the properties market, being lost among non-freehold rules in Abu Dhabi and the lack of real launches shows the lack of orderly organized PR campaigns and Ad campaigns, which brings me back to the logo.

The logo gets roots from a business plan mission statement. One of the founders keeps on pushing the envelope using those words so it gets sticky. When the time comes for going visual, the Arabic slogan needs to get an English face, but, well, it got translated by an Arabic designer(with really no know-how about English copy writing) who wanted to flex some muscles and show sophistication. So it goes like “The idea of being different”.

Now in the properties and development world, ideas can’t stand for nothing. Offerings do! I’m so in love with the way Schon properties came out, it’s about what you’re actually adding to the stack of crowded people hanging out of the bandwagon.

All so-not-thought-of.

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