A while back, I wrote about my ongoing identity crisis and concluded it with the promise that from now on, I’d start making stuff and not overthink it anymore.
Well, I kept my promise. And now, I have a lot on my plate, and I’m very happy about it. Here’s a rundown of what’s happening.
A new business, kinda
Over the past 17 years, I’ve done design work for countless restaurants, bars, and hotels. The hospitality industry isn’t known for big marketing budgets. But the work and the people are fun, and it’s pretty straightforward. Besides — as my weekends underline — I love bars and restaurants.
To finance our bus-to-tiny-house conversion, we need steady and predictable income. So, me and Kiki have started a new collaboration explicitly aimed at brand design for hospitality in the Netherlands. It’s called Gastvrij Horeca Branding, and we’re currently finalizing the portfolio and website. We’ll probably launch in late April.
Workshops, lectures, expert-stuff
I’ve come to accept my faith: there are still no sales numbers for the book. Fine. Whatever. In the meantime, Service Design College has asked me to develop a lecture and (multiple) courses based on my book. They’re supposed to launch in early 2026, so I still have time.
In addition, Donald Roos and I have been invited to join The Institute of Creativity as workshop hosts and/or speakers. This is awesome, but it also makes our efforts to start our own “institute” (under the name The Take Away Network) kind of redundant. So, we’ve postponed TAN for now and will focus our efforts on TIOC instead.
Games
Earlier, I showed a simple prototype of a game I was working on. I put that on hold because another opportunity came knocking that I was much more interested in working on. It’s a physical card game — more specifically, a drinking game — that I created, start to finish, in one day. I even got it back from the printer already. The first 50 copies are sitting on the kitchen table right now, ready to be assembled. I’ll share more about it next week or so.
The bus conversion
No significant updates. We have our drawings and plans, but the bus is still at the trader waiting to undergo some last technical who-gives-a-shits before it can come our way. I’m really eager to get it.
Pour Decisions
Kiki’s “24-hour beer tour” video went viral on Instagram and now has over 600K views. Last Tuesday, we visited Warsaw (Poland) to film a similar video. It was a total mess but a fun one.
However, it did force us to realize that this stuff isn’t compatible with living a healthy lifestyle (and not gaining a ton of weight). Our dry January (and February) gains are already taking hits, so we need to balance this out.
That’s why, for the time being, we’re switching to OMAD on weekdays (one meal a day), giving our bodies some well-deserved rest and time to clean up. It basically means we fast 23 hours a day and eat one enormous meal around 6 PM. If you think OMAD sounds extreme, it’s well-researched and has a ton of benefits without enormous downsides, and it seems to fit right into our current situation.
That’s it for now! Oh — I’m also working on another small thing but I’m not ready to talk about that just yet :). It involves Vincent van Gogh (not personally, he dead).