Our travel accommodations to the 2006 HOW Design Conference should have been a sign to me of things to come. The fact that I dragged my lead designer to the airport with ticketing information that was 5 hours ahead of our actual flight and was flying out LaGuardia, the foulest hobgoblin of all New York airports should have delicately iced the proverbial cake of doom I was about to taste for 4 days in a little town called Las Vegas.

The one thing I realized after several hours of what could be deemed as the “6 o'clock happy hour” in Vegas is that it would abruptly be followed with what shall forever be etched in my mind as “hooker hour” - The hour of 3am, when all of the most fiendish Las Vegas call girls descend on the bars like slime on a Jersey Pond with one thing on their minds - Cash.

It was during one of these moments of booze fueled bliss, that three designers: myself, Bill English of theMechanism and Carl Smith, of nGen fame, found ourselves surrounded by a party of one with trouble etched directly on her delicate, yet acned forehead.

First of all, we thought for sure that she would take the hint...all the yapping about fonts, business strategy and process would scare away even the most persistent of Vegas’ “Ladies of the Evening,” correct? How wrong we could have been. It was time to change strategy. With a simple point of my finger (at Carl) and a miraculous lie (Carl was the owner of eBay), Bill and I managed to curtail the desparate situation and run to the tram that connected the Excalabur to Mandalay Bay with a bevy of hookers in hot pursuit like 1960's teenagers chasing the Beatles.

Now before you begin to worry about Carl, I must remind you that the guy is quicker in situations of dire stress than Mama Cass on a Ham Sandwich. After speaking with the fella the next day, it turns out that he spun a tale on that poor girl that would have scared a junkyard dog from a free steak with meat gravy, served on a plate made of...meat.

So all’s well that ends well, right? Well there’s more to this tale my eager readers. But that will have to wait until tomorrow...

Depending on what newspaper you read, either aged fashion designer Tommy Hilfiger or aged rock dinosaur Axl Rose beat the snot out of the other in a brawl in NYC on Thursday night. Funny, considering both Axl and Hilfiger look like a couple of old ladies and without their questionable "celeb" status, would certainly have trouble getting into any fashionable NYC club.

But according to this post, Hilfiger went bananas on Axl, putting a solid "check mark" for the designer column in the global "Who's tougher, rock stars or designers" debate.

Jane Jakobs was an American-born Canadian writer, best known for The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), which attacked postwar modernist urban renewal policies in the U.S.. She examined how cities should work from street design to how to them friendly for all forms of transport.

She died at the ripe old age of 89, and theMechanism salutes her.

Read a fantastic interview conducted by Metropolis Magazine in 2000 here.

The folks in the office know that I've been back on my David Ogilvy tip since I've been openly spewing his knowledge of late. Ogilvy's words and I have the same relationship that most people have with a favorite movie, song or book... I pick him up every 6 months or so, overdose on his prose and I'm excited about the industry again.

For the uninformed, the guy started his agency on Madison Avenue in 1949 and the biggest change during his tenure in the heyday of the "Biz", was that Television became a more important medium than Print to Advertisers.

So, it begs the question, "What could he have said that was so damn important to us today?" The answer is nearly everything...

Let's take a look at a few of Ogilvy's many points on "How to produce advertising that sells" and how they relate to today's design world:

• Do your homework.
  A great point. Just like back in the heyday of print, as designers today, we must rely on research to get us through client engagements, meetings and projects. Research remains the cornerstone of any project today (about 70% of any project's time should be spent on it) and if you disagree, you're probably wondering why clients aren't returning your calls.
• Positioning.
  Positioning your ads in the most appropriate publications and on the most effective pages continues to be the cherry on the top of any design project. You can do a fantastic job on something, but unless someone can see it and react to it, it's a useless effort.
• Brand Image.
  The image, as they say is everything. If you are a client, be sure that your brand and agency of record are in sync. Branding encompasses and revolves around a singular message when you're working in Print, Web, Motion Graphics, Audio or Video.

If you're interested in more of this kind of stuff to get your brain cooking, check out either Confessions of an Advertising Man or Ogilvy on Advertising.

Both sometimes get slightly dated in jargon, but overall are worth reading cover to cover...

...More than once.