Charles Apple

Here in Johannesburg, it has rained and rained and rained some more. It’s cold and the wind is whipping around, causing the chill factor to be in the low 40s and high 30s at night

It’s particularly interesting for me because I didn’t even bring a long-sleeved shirt. I have only one jacket — my sport coat. Brrrr.

The good news: It won’t last much longer. The five day forecast — by my friends at the WeatherUnderground – shows it’ll clear off this weekend and then it’ll be much, much warmer next week:

The view from my sixth-floor hotel room takes in much of the skyline of the north end of town. Not that you can see anything:

Not surprising, given the cloud cover. Here’s the current satellite image, again via the Weather Underground:

Yeah. Pretty bad.

There are flood warnings out of low-lying sections of Johannesburg and two people were killed in accidents related to heavy rain in KwaZulu-Natal, southeast of here.

So in the middle of this deluge, I ventured out Thursday to the northern suburb of Sandton to visit the offices of FinWeek, Media24’s weekly financial magazine.

FinWeek is a sister publication of Sake24, the business section that inserts daily into Beeld here in Johannesburg, Burger in Cape Town and Volksblad in Bloemfontein.

Unlike Sake24, however, FinWeek publishes parallel editions in Afrikaans and English. Meaning I can actually read some of their stories.

I met with about a dozen editors, reporters and designers. We critiqued the current edition of their publication — which arrived fresh from the printer exactly when I did — and I made presentations on a number of topics.

Naturally, I didn’t think to haul out my camera until most of our crowd had dissolved.

On the left, there, is Jignasa Diar, FinWeek’s wonderful art director. Or, more precisely, she’s the Kreatiew Hoof — the creative director. She supervises three designer/artists and one production artist, plus conceptualizes covers and cover story treatments inside.

What impressed me very much about our sessions was that the magazine’s editor — or Redakteur, Colleen Naudé — stayed through every single session.

She’s very interested in visual presentation and eagerly soaked up every point I made all day long. You have to love an editor like that.

They even brought in lunch. About halfway through our freshments, I noticed the magazine had their own brand of bottled water:

We sat and talked and shared slideshows for several hours. While outside, it poured. Even the sheltered area of FinWeek’s outdoor terrace was flooded out.

I absolutely must show you this, however…

As you reach the meeting room where we were Thursday, you pass this door. As you can see, the label on the door says Nasdaq.

But do you see the short wall to the right of the door? That’s all there is to that wall. You can walk to the right and around the door.

Here’s a reverse angle, taken about five steps in front of where that last picture was from:

You might notice that silver door frame and wonder if it is part of a removable partition or wall or something.

No, it isn’t. This is simply a door to nowhere.

I had a lot of fun with that door Thursday. Much to the concern of the FinWeek office staff, who probably wonder what medications I’m taking.

Meanwhile, I made a number of presentations here in the main MediaPark building as well. Tuesday, I gave my Art of Being Brilliant show and Wednesday, I taught a session on visual ethics. Both were for Beeld, the Johannesburg daily.

In addition, the Beeld designer came in late Tuesday afternoon in a bit of a bind. He needed help with what we in the U.S. would call an Op-Ed illustration. And he didn’t have much time.

Illustration is one of my weakest areas. But I did what I could, as quickly as I could:

The headline reads “OK on the outside, but broken on the inside.” It’s about a woman grieving for her husband, who was killed in a violent act.

The color of the illustration matched the colored text in the intro. At least it did on the page. It doesn’t look like it here, though.

In addition, I stepped in this week to help out with yet another sports graphic. South African swimmers are doing very, very well in a large, multi-part swim meet. So we wanted to show how well they’re doing, going into this weekend’s final events.

I stayed late Wednesday — because I was to be at FinWeek Thursday — working on the piece, which was to run six columns on Beeld’s huge, six-column format. A few headers here are in English. And I didn’t have one of the mugs I wanted. But here was what I turned in late Wednesday evening:

My piece was a shade too tall, however. So they had to trim it quite a bit. I’m not crazy about what happened with the intro — it turned into a photo caption that notched into a very horizontal picture. But most of the graphic came out pretty well:

Elsolet Joubert, left, and Salomé Nourse wear warm, fuzzy sweaters to fight off the chill Friday afternoon.

Elsolet spent most of her day on a nearly-full-page graphic explaining the performance of a number of key stocks.

Salomé checks the piece she did on welfare distribution for the Op-Ed page of today’s Beeld.

Meanwhile, Anton Vermeulen worked on a number of pieces for the Sunday Rapport plus this Saturday sports piece on famous sports scandals.

Wearing a light jacket, Anton makes final corrections as sports editor Bokkie Gerber looks over his shoulder.

Bokkie — dressed in a warm vest — raises an eyebrow at me. “Aren’t you cold?,” he asks.

You’re damn right I am.

Well. Not that cold, perhaps. But pretty chilly.

Now, please excuse me. I’m going to burn a few tearsheets for warmth.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 20th, 2009 at 9:59 am and is filed under Travelogue, Trip to South Africa. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.