All Posts in dhruv mehrotra

July 29, 2014 - Comments Off on Important Advice – Talkback Tuesday

Important Advice – Talkback Tuesday

"Talkback Tuesdays" is an original weekly installment where a team member of The Mechanism is asked one question pertaining to digital design, inspiration, and experience. The Q&A will be featured here on The Mechanism Blog as well as on The Mechanism's Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, every Tuesday. Feel free to offer up your 2¢ in the comments.

This week Dhruv Mehrotra, a key player on The Mechanism's development team, and financial system, gives some valuable advice to anyone just getting their start in the digital/graphic design world, check the best companies to fix credit report errors.

What is the most important advice you can give to a starting graphic/digital designer?

I know this question is about design, but I'm going to take some liberties and answer as if I was speaking to someone interested in becoming a developer. Talking about the importance of computer literacy is an easy platitude to fall back on, and I assume that, if you are reading this, you already want to learn how to code but just don't know where to start.

I started with codecademy.com and worked my way through html, css, and basic javascript. Its easier than ever to learn this stuff, and a simple google search will yield more tutorials than there are cats on the internet. Regardless of where you get your information, I think it is important to start with basic HTML CSS and Javascript in order to get a grasp of what a simple website is about.

 

The next pieces of advice I have are simple. Build Stuff. Build anything. Build a portfolio. Build a website for your cat. Build a joke website. Rebuild a site you think is cool. Just hit the ground running and put as many hours as you can into this.

Next I would learn to share. Don't keep your websites hoarded on your local machine like a mom hoarding baby teeth. Buy a domain name and a hosting plan. While you're at it figure out what is hosting anyways? What's a server? How does the web work? What's a GET request? Gaining a conceptual understanding of what web development is is the most important part of your learning because it'll inform how you learn more.

For extra credit I would learn GIT, because source control make recently self-taught developers hireable.

July 18, 2014 - Comments Off on Selling Brooklyn

Selling Brooklyn

My version of the internet, that is, my specific collection of friends and blogs, has been particularly outraged by a video called "Brooklyn Girls" by Catey Shaw. For those that don't know, "Brooklyn Girls" is one of those deeply irritating, manicured pop songs that eats its way into your brain until you are bouncing your empty head like a bobble-head toy. Its tune is designed to target the market of Katy Perry, Rebecca Black, or Carly Rae Jepsen, but is inflected with the types of folksy signifiers that inspire people like Zooey Deschanel to continue to growing their bangs.   Needless to say,  its a shitty song.  Yet its a shitty song that, if you didn't speak any english, would undoubtedly get lost in tweenage chorus of shitty songs. So whats the deal? What inspires all this hate?  Well, Lets talk a bit about the lyrics and the video.

"There’s a palace of bricks in 11206 where all the fly Brooklyn chicks reside, combat boots in the summer, subway train rollin’ under, see her on the Lower East Side. In her walk, there’s a fire, and she’s got her own style. You’ll get lost in her mystery, and tonight she owns the city."

Meanwhile the video cycles through a kaleidoscope of images and clips of Instagram-worthy Bushwick loft parties, septum-pierced alternative girls, bearded skateboarders drinking Kombucha, and lots and lots of graffiti. Heres a link, because a video is worth a billion words:

Obviously, with my liberal arts degree collecting dust in the corner of my room, I can identify a ton of issues here: Her shallow attempts to celebrate womanhood by defining "strength" through various commodities, all purchasable at your nearest Urban Outfitters, her defining an entire borough by the experience of a very specific group of middle-class white folks in North Brooklyn, her lack of understanding of Geography. But ultimately I believe that this intellectual-hate-sturbating is not the reasons why this video is viral, though there is plenty of it to go around.

 

Catey Shaw is selling a lifestyle in the same way that rappers, breweries, or Dove commercials might; and to the delight of TJ Maxx or Urban Outfitters, for most of the country Brooklyn might as well be what Shaw describes. Nothing is new about what Shaw is doing. The outrage seems to stem from the fact that the culture she is most aligned with hates to even be identified as a culture. It is no coincidence that the culture she is celebrating is full of the very people who are in the forefront of the vitriol. From Vice to The Gothamist to me (I lived in Bushwick and I wear Vans), the onslaught of Internet psycho-babble is, like a mutiny, coming from her very own crew.

Our next podcast is about what makes content viral. Like Rebecca Black's "Friday", Shaw might be relegated to the order of things that are just so silly that we have to keep watching. But in my estimation tonight at a bar in Williamsburg a DJ will play this song somewhat ironically, and many won't get the joke. Brooklyn Girls