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July 20, 2008 - Comments Off on Plump Dumpling Branding is Strange

Plump Dumpling Branding is Strange

Plump Dumpling“Plump Dumpling,” a tiny hole-in-the-wall dumpling hut in the East Village has a good following and some tasty dumplings to boot. However, close examination of their current branding reveals strange werewolf-like bloody scratches on their otherwise “happy vernacular” identity mark. I'm not certain why the scratches are prominent as part of the branding, but one could speculate that the logo took some lumps from rival Lucas Lin’s “Dumpling Man” back in the dumpling wars of 2005.

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. He prefers his dumplings with a side-effect of lycanthropy.

Published by: davefletcher in The Design Mechanism
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July 18, 2008 - 4 comments

GAP Comes Clean with Actual Fabric Used in Clothing

GAP/RAG imageWhile 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.

Published by: davefletcher in The Design Mechanism

July 17, 2008 - Comments Off on ISOC-NY monthly meeting

ISOC-NY monthly meeting

ISOC-NY's July monthly meeting will take place tonight, 17 July 2008, at NYU.

Date: Thursday, 17 Jul 2008
Time: 7:00 pm–9:00 pm
Location: Room 317, 251 Mercer Street NYC (SW corner of West 4th)
Note: Use the entrance on the west side since construction blocks the Mercer Street entrance. Must bring photo ID.

Agenda

  • Meet new members. We expect and welcome new faces!
  • By-laws reform. Needed but a drudge! How can we set about it?
  • Planning future meetings and events. Good news is we have just received a sizable grant from ISOC-NY for our Fall program.
  • ISXubuntu Linux project progress report. News from our trusty coders.
  • OneWebDay planning progress report. Washington Square Sep 22 event taking shape
  • Access advocacy program. Just an idea at present—the city needs some kind of central resource for those with connection difficulties.
  • ICANN. Tom Lowenhaupt will report on his experiences at the ICANN Paris meet in June.
  • Web standards. How can we make our own & OneWebDay sites W3C compliant?

Jeffrey Barke is senior developer and information architect at theMechanism, a multimedia firm with offices in New York, London and Durban, South Africa.

Published by: jeffreybarke in The Programming Mechanism
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July 15, 2008 - Comments Off on WordPress 2.6 now available

WordPress 2.6 now available

Version 2.6 "Tyner," named for jazz pianist McCoy Tyner, contains a number of new features that make WordPress a more powerful CMS: you can now track changes to every post and page and easily post from wherever you are on the web, plus there are dozens of incremental improvements to the features introduced in version 2.5.

Read about all the updates at the WordPress blog and download 2.6 here.

Published by: jeffreybarke in The Programming Mechanism

July 12, 2008 - Comments Off on Paul Rand interviewed in 1991

Paul Rand interviewed in 1991

I used to live near Pratt Institute, on Vanderbilt Avenue in Brooklyn. One of the many great graphic artists and designers that attended Pratt was Paul Rand (back in 1929). For those of you that don’t know the name (shame on you), Paul Rand (August 15, 1914 "“ November 26, 1996) was an American graphic designer, best known for his corporate logo designs, helping to originate the Swiss Style of graphic design, and keen thinking and curmudgeonly attitude about our profession.

I stumbled on a 1991 interview with Rand conducted by Miggs B, producer/host of “Miggs B On TV,” a public access TV show in Fairfield County, Connecticut.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3 of the interview features an idiot known as “Art Mann,” – a bit of a ghoul – and obviously a bi-product of early 90’s baboonery. Rand doesn’t fully grasp the intended humor of a segment where Art claims that Westinghouse came to him to simplify their logo (one of Rand’s logo designs), which added uncomfortability to the hearty porridge of nonsense that was being served up to Rand in heaping spoonfuls.

Part 3

However out of date the interview segment is, it is full of great nuggets from one of the “design greats.” One of Rand’s quotes that particularly impressed me was, "A good logo is meaningless until it is used." Good food for thought, indeed.

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.

Published by: davefletcher in The Design Mechanism, The Thinking Mechanism
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July 11, 2008 - Comments Off on theMechanism’s browser support

theMechanism’s browser support

theMechanism follows Yahoo!'s Graded Browser Support and agrees with the GBS approach:

In the first 10 years of professional web development, back in the early '90s, browser support was binary: Do you—or don't you—support a given browser? When the answer was "No," user access to the site was often actively prevented. In the years following IE5's release in 1998, professional web designers and developers have become accustomed to asking at the outset of any new undertaking, "Do I have to support Netscape 4.x browsers for this project?"

By contrast, in modern web development we must support all browsers. Choosing to exclude a segment of users is inappropriate, and, with a "Graded Browser Support" strategy, unnecessary.

The two principal concepts of GBS are a broader and more reasonable definition of "support" and the notion of "grades" of support.

Read more

Published by: jeffreybarke in The Programming Mechanism
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July 9, 2008 - 10 comments

It’s No Joke(r) – Batman’s Movie Graphics Mirror “The Crow”

While strolling through Noho the other day, I was stopped in my tracks by the recent Batman: The Dark Knight movie poster. The image of Heath Ledger as The Joker, with his shoulders hunched, dark coat and white face paint immediately called to mind one of my favorite movie characters - The Crow.

The similarities in the graphics and toys from the two movies are striking.

Besides the obvious visual examples, there are notable common elements regarding the characters and actors. Although the characters are on opposite ends of the "good vs. evil" spectrum, they were both profoundly affected by losing someone they loved, resulting in the need to transform their appearances and seek revenge. The most startling similarity, of course, is the shocking deaths of both movies' stars. Neither Brandon Lee nor Heath Ledger lived to see their films released. Both died tragically at age 28.

So what do you think? Did Batman's marketing department intentionally mirror the graphics with the goal of subliminally tapping into the cult phenomenon of Brandon Lee's Crow? Or is it just an eerie coincidence?

Sharon Terry is a marketing and public relations consultant at theMechanism, a multimedia firm with offices in New York, London and Durban, South Africa. She’s partial to Batman even though she married a joker.

Published by: sharonterry in The Thinking Mechanism

July 9, 2008 - 6 comments

Some Useful Firefox 3 Hacks

I finally joined the "Upgraded to Firefox 3" club today and so far, I'm pretty happy with it. However, I was happier after I came across 12 Quick Hacks for Firefox 3 written by Preston Gralla for Computerworld. The article provides some hacks and features to make FF3 a bit more usable and FF2-like for those of you who are resisting some of the changes. I immediately implemented #3: Having Gmail Handle mailto: Links and #6: Shrink the Back Button, and I'm looking forward to utilizing the Get Web Details (#5) feature for developing.

Christy Gurga is junior designer and programmer at theMechanism, a multimedia firm with offices in New York, London and Durban, South Africa.

Published by: christygurga in The Programming Mechanism

July 9, 2008 - Comments Off on Firebug extensions

Firebug extensions

As Jan Odvarko notes, "I was surprised how many Firebug extensions … exist out there." Check out his list of 12 extensions at http://www.softwareishard.com/blog/firebug/list-of-firebug-extensions/. All extensions include a brief summary of what they do, a screen capture and a link to the download page.

Two that I use are YSlow and Odvarko's own Firecookie.. YSlow analyzes Web pages and determines why they're slow based on Yahoo's rules for high performance web sites. Firecookie makes it possible to view and manage cookies within the familiar Firebug UI.

Jeffrey Barke is senior developer and information architect at theMechanism, a multimedia firm with offices in New York, London and Durban, South Africa.

Published by: jeffreybarke in The Programming Mechanism
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