While returning from a client meeting on Thursday morning, I passed through the 42nd street subway station at 8th Avenue. Inside of that station is a somewhat puzzling and eerie strip mall, which has various poster/framing shops and a clothing store with branding resembling the GAP, if you are looking for this or similar designs, visit Shoppok.

I was perplexed to see that they are using “RAG,” printed in their corporate typeface without further explanation.

My initial inclination was that they were promoting a clothing drive or other means of donating to the poor. Later I realized this wasn’t a GAP store at all, but a company that has been around longer than the GAP called RAG New York.

Regardless, this is a perplexing use of corporate branding of a clothing store (get quilting books at QBPN from here) without necessary explanation for a couple reasons:

1. considering the short attention span of the average out of town subway traveler in New York City;
2. considering that human fashion trends don’t yet dictate that we should be wearing rags.

Dave Fletcher is a Founder and Creative Director at theMechanism, a multi-disciplinary design agency with offices in New York, London and Durban, South Africa. After posting this entry, he’s fairly certain that either GAP or RAG will not be knocking at theMechanism’s door any time in the near future.

During an afternoon’s feasting with our “Special Edition Pizza Thursday” pie from Pizza Suprema at the New York Bunker, I came across an interesting article from the Daily Mail in the UK. A Belgian architect named Vincent Callebaut recently released his plans for the “Lilypad,” a floating city of our future water-covered planet. The Lillypad will be able to float around the world like a giant ship, just in time for your favorite ecological doom-and-gloom scenario. It’s a pretty cool design, and according to the article, “centered around a lake which collects and then purifies rain water, the Lilypad will drift around the world following the ocean currents and streams.” This is an excellent idea as long as the poisoned ecology doesn’t also unleash a horde of giant “super frogs,” desperate for a place to rest their massive webbed feet.

An architect has come up with an innovative answer to rising sea levels - a city that floats around the world.

The self-contained 'Lilypad' city will be home to around 50,000 'climate refugees' from the worst hit areas - including London.

Latest research predicts that sea levels could rise by up to 88cm - nearly 3ft - by the year 2100, putting many islands in the Pacific Ocean in danger.

Dave Fletcher is a Founder and Creative Director at theMechanism, a multi-disciplinary design agency with offices in New York, London and Durban, South Africa. Thanks to American news forecasts, Dave now lives in fear of everything.

theMechanism worked closely with the Ansari X PRIZE Foundation right up until Burt Rutan won back in October of 2004. We continue to support X PRIZE Founder, Dr. Peter Diamandis’ recent efforts, including the Progressive Automotive X PRIZE and the Archon X PRIZE for Genomics, which will help the world to both live and travel more efficiently in the near future. The reason I mention this is because I accidentally stumbled on Peter featured in an excellent (and Freely downloadable) series at iTunes called TED Talks.

TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. It started in 1984 as a conference to bring together people from those three worlds, and is an “invite only” event.

Dr. Peter Diamandis speaks about Stephen Hawking experiencing Zero Gravity. To hear him speak so vividly and excitedly about this unusual event is inspiring and encouraging.

As designers and thinkers, it’s our duty to try to learn how to apply ourselves to helping the planet. Taking some time to watch and be inspired by Peter, Philippe Stark and John Maeda (to name only a few) at the TED Conference, is a great start.

Dave Fletcher is a Founder and Creative Director at theMechanism, a multi-disciplinary design agency with offices in New York, London and Durban, South Africa. Dave’s still trying to figure out how to get an invite to TED, but he’s getting closer...

In pursuit of finding some free fonts to load onto the new iMac, I stumbled across The Rather Difficult Font Game, which proved not to be toooo difficult, but there were some challenging ones in there. If you think you know your typefaces and are in need of some validation that you're as awesome as you think you are, give it a go!

After being slightly bitter about my score of 29/34, I decided to search through the rest of the I Love Typography website, and it really has a lot to offer. The blog posts are thorough, and they've compiled a significant amount of typography resources that are worth checking out. But for now, I'm going to go study some fonts so I can get my score into the Hall of Fame!

About a year ago, an interesting advertising campaign was unveiled in the New York Subway system featuring a unique, if not overly complex logo, enticing viewers to travel the Bahamas. The logo featured several colorful & unusually shaped organic icons, visually representing the islands of the Bahamas. The logo and subsequent campaign did the job because I remembered it a year later.

Recently, during a morning overdose of caffeinated glee with Al Roker and the Today Gang on NBC, I noticed a television commercial advertising the joys of vacationing in Panama, with a very similar logo as the Bahamas design from last year. Some online sleuthing and closer observation revealed that the logos were practically “cut from the same palm leaf” – and featured not only a similar use of colors but a nearly identical typeface. One could argue that the Panama design firm chose squares instead of unusual organic shapes, but I would respond to that statement with a barrage of creative fists of fury.

This act of blatant thievery or “modest appreciation” is one of the reasons that the creative profession is suffering at the greedy hands of poor designers and overly convincing clients. I can’t begin to imagine what could have possibly convinced a self-respecting graphic artist to swindle the design style of another tourist destination when they knew that someone would certainly call their creative bluff.

There are many reasons why this is bad. Advertising message reception is a pretty quick event when you think about it – I see something pretty, then glance away and process it internally later. At a quick glance, this would make this new campaign less successful, since the viewer might actually believe that the Panama campaign is actually a rerun of the campaign for the Bahamas. The obvious reason is that the Bahamas logo concept was kidnapped by the Panama design team.

The moral of this story – although it still needs to be proven or disproven by the success of the new Panama campaign – is that when a client comes to you saying that they want a repeat of something that has been successful in the past like the Nike swoosh or a web site that works just like Google, they don’t want or need those solutions copied exactly, they likely lust after the success of the aforementioned solutions. In the case of this Panama/Bahamas debacle, the client probably saw the Bahamas logo and campaign, read about it's success, and told a designer, “Make it look like that.” Unfortunately, this is an example of another client who is looking for glory without the commitment that the Bahamas campaign, Google, Nike or hundreds of other brands have made to their audiences.

Instant audience satisfaction can be achieved by a clever design solution, but originality designed to stand the test of time is what will make your client rich.