Sitting in my office the other day, our VP of IT lifted out his (new) iPhone from his (old) Levenger Bomber Jacket phone holster.
“Still fits,” he pronounced.
Had we planned it that way? Or were we lucky?
Actually, it was a bit of both.
Levenger has long been a company that looks back and forward at the same time. Many customers know us for our fountain pens and note pads. But we were also the first company to offer the very first e-reader, the Rocket eBook, back in the 1990s. We’re currently at work on bringing out our first Levenger Press e-book, even as we continue to make our paper books ever more wondrous objects. And we love making products that fit the iPad and others of its e-ilk.
We call our half-virtual, half-physical approach one of productive coexistence—pc, Levenger-style. There’s a bit of the new and old in most of us. Check out our Bomber Jacket collection, and the cool new Grid-It and Timbuk2 selections as tangible proof.
We don’t make the smartphones, but we make smart cases that fit them—and they will likely last through several generations of these tech wonders. Our bags and laptop sleeves likewise are designed to serve you longer than several typical laptops and table PCs.
We don’t create online project management systems, but we design paper note-taking systems that can work in sync and supplement them. All of use keyboards, but most of us also like to use the older technologies of pens and paper.
Levenger lap desks work for handwritten letters and paper books and just as well for laptops and e-readers. Our dictionary and bookstands likewise fit the new electronic readers, even though they were designed for their papery predecessors. And there's nothing wrong with using a Levenger Thai Pad for your iPad and then later for your beautifully printed paper book.
It still fits.
A good fit—for life, and for productivity
Nicholas Carr, the author of The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, maintained in a recent Wall Street Journal article that technology is quite literally changing the way we think. And yet no matter how our brains shift, our hearts remain steadfast. We humans strive to be in touch and stay in touch, but we still yearn for the physical touch. As a headline in the New York Times cautioned, “To win over today’s users, gadgets have to be touchable.”
Still fits.
How about you, dear reader—do you find yourself balancing old and new? And do the two still fit? I’d love to hear how you do it. Just click on the Comments link below with your submission. (If you’re reading this as an email, click here and you'll connect to Comments).