En Route is Sharna Law's company – she travels a lot, ran two stores that sold travel-related stuff, luggage included, and out of that came a lot of ideas for improving luggage, none of which any manufacturer she could find had much interest in — so she found some manufacturers of her own, mostly in China, and started designing the luggage herself.

Much of it is ergonomically better, often a lot better, than a lot of other luggage on the market – it's as if the stuff was designed by someone who actually had to use it (which is exactly what's going on, of course)– and her prices are competitive.

HMI is an environmental non-profit. They help land managers to restore damaged land and increase the health and productivity of the soil– usually, using grazing animals to do so.

No, really. Turns out, grazing animals and grassland co-evolved: the american west, for example, didn't have lush grassland in spite of several million buffalo. It had lush grassland because of them. In nature, predators chase them around ... and voila: no overgrazing. Plus they poop fertilizer, break upcompacted soil, and so on.

People (the current predators) can learn how to chase domestic animals around pretty much the same way. (You don't have to eat them, either: thousands of dairy cattle are successfully managed this way. by Horizon Organic.)

If you'd like to know more about HMI, please see The HMI website, which I designed. Thanks.

African Sojourn Nature Safaris – about what it sounds like. They're in Zimbabwe. Yikes.

Special thanks to Design Elements by Ultimate Symbol, without whom the acacia tree would probably have been a tracing nigntmare. The "wood engraving" look for the clouds is actually a Photoshop filter (Andromeda). I don't get kickbacks from either company; I just figure you are what you share these days. And they both make nice stuff.

That's about all I know about them: they're management consultants. They already had the name. The blue and gray was in response to "we want a color version, very IBM, O.K.?"

A "spot logotype" really, pretty much to be used like a "spot illustration)

Originally it was designed to be printed with gold metallic ink ... not sure whether they used it that way or not.