The new CommsCafe consultancy starts to take shape
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As part of my research I felt there was a need to create a full branded experience for the CommsCafe (the name of the consultancy).
The name follows on from and ties in with the CommsCafe podcast that Allan Jenkins and I publish every fortnight or so (depending on our respective client commitments). So I nabbed some tasty island land and Allan and I went off in search of a suitable house-cum-office on which to build.
Originally I had intended to build something very Australian in flavour — full of Colorbond steel and glass — but the designs we eventually chose were a lot quicker to put together than me hacking about for weeks on end… let alone my patience level not having to be tested because some dagnabbit piece of wood or steel wouldn’t stay in the right place.
When I first joined Second Life I bought my first land (as everyone who is a paying member does) at a ‘knock-down’ rate. On the 512sq ft piece of land I built something a little different — a lighthouse.
I chose a lighthouse because one of my neighbours is seemingly bent on world domination with his collection of super-sonic fighter jets. Plus his house and flight pads combination stood many metres high.
But the downside of a small piece of land is that the view is minimal at best and atrocious at worst.
So I moved us over to Podcasters Island, where the chap behind PickleRadio had built a tasty series of apartments. Beautiful location, nice allowance for podcasting toys (the streaming mp3 player looked like an iPod; nice touch)…
BUT no ability to name my apartment and so no-one looking for the CommsCafe in a search would find it. Damn… you kinda had to know me to be given a Landmark card. So it was back to the 512sq ft parcel…
The neighbourhood and the view was really annoying, plus the lighthouse was not a good place to have a meeting. We did manage one meeting there, but it wasn’t the most conducive of locations. So perhaps I was better off finding a place where there was plenty of ‘footfall’ traffic.
By pure chance I came across ‘Barcelona’ and found a really tasty corner store, right on the beach, where the ambience was right, reasonable footfall, and the owners were friendly. All was great, but still the biggest bugbear was present — no naming rights. No one could find me unless they knew me.
Here’s a picture of Isabella Scheflo, one of my colleagues here in Adelaide, modelling a CommsCafe t-shirt at our Barcelona location… >>>
If they searched for the Comms Cafe they would find the ‘old’ land, so I had to set up a large billboard telling people that I’d moved. Then I had to shop around for scripts that would enable me to automatically give visitors a notecard explaining to where I had moved.
But folks still had trouble getting over to the new Cafe, so I had to figure out a way of giving them a Landmark card so they could teleport to my new home (I had tried teleporting scripts, but after spending a few hundred Linden I came to realise that they only worked within about a 300 metre range, and certainly not from one island to another. Dangnabbit!)
In the end the frustration with all of this to-ing and fro-ing got the better of me — in a blaze of swearing I vowed to find some decent land and set up shop there.
In the end I found the ideal spot — because the view was knockout and the covenant wonderful: no large towers, no gothic castles on beachfronts, no flattening the rocky terrain to nothingness just because you like ‘flat earth’… No spy scripts, no violence, no noise… wonderful!
Allan and I looked at tons of houses, 99% of which were as boring and unimaginative as… as… well, as something that is boring and unimaginative.
We found the designs we could live with at Hydro Homes [Ear (45, 246, 53)].
Yes, there is still lots to do; furniture, lighting, posters of clients and friends to hang on the walls, pots and plants, trees in the garden, perhaps a bit of a shrubbery… patience, young Skywalker.Was it all terribly expensive? Reassuringly so…
Enjoy the photos below - click on them to show a larger version…
And next time you’re in-world, look us up: search ‘Places’ for ‘CommsCafe’ (SLurl).
Cheers!
Lee
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Except some bozo has built some nightclub-cum-bordello just up the hill. Grrrr…
True. But he’s also our landlord and the owner of the group of islands… one rule for the rich, one for the poor…
We COULD have built something bigger, but I wanted something both manageable and respectful of the surroundings.
If things get sooo busy that we take on staff, all of whom need their own office, then we might have to use one of the other buildings, or else another copy of the same house and a linking bridge between the two.