Archive for August, 2006.
Aug 31 | Posted by Dave Fletcher | Add a Comment
I’m going to bemoan a well-known, yet half-witted deception in our glamor profession. It’s always fished out of some ol’ art directors “bag o’ tricks” when their feeble minds have really lost touch with today’s changing audience. The trick — which I reckon you guessed from the title — is the placement of sunglasses on a tired or new brand in order to make it seem (to regurgitate the antiquated slang slung around creative meetings that produce this drivel) “hipster” and “with it”. Recently, I’ve witnessed sunglasses added to my beloved Pepperidge Farm Goldfish®, who’s crack advertising group has ridiculously renamed Finn™ on the “Xplosive Pizza” flavor (note: changing “ex” to “x” for added “zip” is another mark of idiocy in the field, but we’ll bait n’ tackle that another time). It’s clear that sunglasses are being used as pawns in audacious attempts to revive old weathered brands — from The Muppets™, adding a little “edge” to their otherwise dismal puppet lives, to giving a little “kick” to Fruity Pebbles™ by adding shaded eye-googler covers to aged toons Fred and Barney, turning them into a couple of “cool cats”, right? Wrong!
In this age of obviously poor judgement from rock stars and politicians alike, do we creatives really have to follow suit with this hocus pocus? Isn’t there anything else that can be used to revive a tired brand or enliven a new one? Every time you see a Ray-Ban™ donning cheetah hocking cheese snacks at the local grocery store, I advise you to punch it squarely in the snout on principle alone. How far from the tree of greatness has the mighty graphic designer fallen to continually unleash this tired cliché on a clearly “suspecting” audience?
What is it that makes sunglasses look cool? It wasn’t Corey Hart. According to Wikipedia, the global source for highly accurate (suspect) and 99.999% truthful (mis)information, sunglasses have “been associated with celebrities and film actors primarily due to the desire to mask identity, but in part due to the lighting involved in production being typically stronger than natural light and uncomfortable to the naked eye.”
So, then one must assume, what insolent designers are attempting to accomplish by adding sunglasses to cartoon rodents, rabbits and bears, is to ultimately brainwash unsuspecting children into thinking that these beasts are celebrities? I’ve got a news-flash for you — kids aren’t stupid anymore, and aren’t buying that these bloodthirsty creatures are celebrities. It didn’t work in the long run for “Salisbury’s Camel“, and it’s not working for anyone else. Mike Salisbury either created or abused the stupidest cliché in our biz by not only creating a phallic-faced, smiling creature that kids would be attracted to like rats to a pipe(r) — but to add insult to injury, he also slapped sunglasses on it! That statement alone demands that he be ousted from any Art Director’s Club immediately with surfboard and smokes firmly in hand.
I’ve also been privy to this nonsense first-hand. Back in 1991, as an intern for a long defunct advertising agency in Buffalo, New York, I witnessed a rotund (and usually hung over), art director adding sunglasses to the mascot of a local amusement park for a series of billboards welcoming 2 months of summer to the region before our 10 months of miserable Arctic temperatures that could only be compared to the chill of being dropped at at the midpoint between earth and the moon in a wet bathing suit. Thankfully, his aesthetic rubbed me the wrong way — not only because he was applying sunglasses to the mascot, but because the mascot for the amusement park was indeed, a smirking sun!
If you’re a designer, I implore that before you apply a pair of sunglasses to your cute little snail mascot you’ve whipped up for your next project, rationalize that the problem with the design might not be the fact that you’re appealing to an audience by anthropomorphizing a slimy garden pest in protective eyewear — it’s possible that you’ve begun to run out of ideas. With God as my witness, last Tuesday I saw sunglasses on Barney® the dinosaur…
It’s like slathering Rite-Guard® on a dead skunk.
Dave Fletcher is a Founder and Creative Director of theMechanism, a maxi-media firm in New York City and London. While he’s been known to wear a pair of orange-tinted sunglasses to block out the rays of Mr. Sun, he insists that he is neither a tired brand or anthropomorphized bird or beer can, so it’s ok.
Aug 29 | Posted by Sharon | 2 comments
Once you drive through the Holland Tunnel, there’s a strip of highway in Jersey City where Dave Fletcher and I sometimes play a little game called “Spot the Hooker.” Chances are at any time of day or night, you will see a scantily clad lady trolling the lanes for her next conquest ready to check in to any one of the motels that litter this particular section of town. You won’t find the words “Hilton,” “Marriott” or even “Best” or “Western” in their names. You will however, see the words “Hourly Rates” and “Free HBO” pretty frequently.
However, during one of our games I noticed something beyond the hookers and the signs for mirrored rooms. I realized that each motel parking lot on this street of sin was designed to block the view of their customers’ cars. This was no accident. Drive a 1996 light blue Dodge minivan? Don’t worry…nobody will spot that tell-tale “Ask me about my (insert school here) honor student” bumper sticker. Borrowed your girlfriend’s Sentra for a night of fun with your new “friend” Candy? Well, your secret is safe behind that giant wall, curved fence or landscaped shrubbery.
Sure, you can call these motels sleazy but you can also call their parking lot design clever. Take a look for yourself next time you are driving through the shady side of “Anytown, USA”.
Sharon Terry is the Marketing Specialist for theMechanism, a maxi-media firm in New York City and London. When she’s not hunting down hookers in the backstreets of New Jersey while listening to Bruce Springsteen, she’s busy trying to make theMechanism’s wisdom required reading in local corporate circles.
Aug 25 | Posted by Joshua Ingber | Add a Comment
…is home of the Lutheran Teachers College, and just one of the places I stopped on my driving journey to Vegas and back. In Seward we met Ronoc, and when I say “we” there needs to be some clarification: “We” is my band, the Upwelling; consisting of Ari, Conor and myself. We were on a tour through the midwest and Seward seemed like a good place to stop for a cheap motel, gas, and a sandwich. Little did we know, we would gain an insight into the Creator, himself.
Ronoc is a Seward Elder, but his youthful zeal is surprising to a bunch of New Yorkers. His blue eyes gleam with no squint or trace of redness, and he talks excitedly to Conor of his early morning rise (5am) and jaunt into nature.
Conor is the youngest in our band, and has seen and experienced more of the world than I suspect Ari or I. He seldom goes to bed before sun up, and his brown eyes reveal the wear of his journeys. His experiences with nature have been tenuos at best. This is most evident by the series of scars on his elbow from diving into a bed of Rocks in Iowa.
Watching Conor and Ronoc talk about their opposite lives on the corner of a Seward street (as it was being cleared for the town’s weenie-race), was surreal. There was a purple glow of light surrounding both figures. Each seemed to go out of focus. I thought they would cancel each other out.
Luckily Conor left Seward safely, excluding a minor headache. He blames the coffee. Ari blames Ronoc…I blame God.
The point is, clearly God created the universe with principles pertaining to balanced design. But unlike theMechanism, God seems a bit careless. How could God let diametrically opposite aspects of his creation come into contact like they did in Seward? It is a miracle that the Universe didn’t collapse.
I guess in a way, I am thankful. I got to witness the “miracle of design” and survive!
Josh Ingber is the Controller at theMechanism, a maxi-media firm in New York City and London. When he’s not tapping out rhythms on his desk, or pondering the mysteries of the universe on company time, he drums for a New York-based band, The Upwelling.
Aug 24 | Posted by Dave Fletcher | Add a Comment
After putting down the phone and scratching my noggin for a millisecond, I realized that there is yet another fiendish horde polluting the internet with lies and tagging practices so sour that they must be stopped in their cloven tracks before they tear down the sturdy house that standards advocates have built. These fanatical search engine marketing parasites are renegades from what was once a gallant group of online SEO warriors, and have made it their mission to steal money from unsuspecting companies that entrust the innards of their websites (usually post-build), to their deceptive will. Their coding practices shiest over what was once lovely code and gleefully turn it into sludge, all to the high expense of their unknowing client.
“alt” stands for “Alternative Text Attribute.” Alternative text describes a graphic image appearing in place of a graphic if someone is browsing without graphics or is using a text-only browser. Furthermore, some people might use devices such as screen readers, which translate the contents of a web page into Braille or speech.
The alt tags for a web site should be simple and be a clear description of the graphic it is referring to and nothing else, as shown below:
Correct Usage of alt tags
alt="Widget Product Box"
Incorrect Usage of alt tags
alt="Widget Product Box - Buy Widgets - Get new widgets - widgets Widget Product Box - Buy Widgets - Get new widgets - widgets"
This unholy spammers tactic is called “keyword stuffing,” and no self-respecting designer should even come close to supporting it. This practice is also highly unethical and unfair to people who have disabilities and require screen readers. I expect that it will likely become part of Section 508 Government Legislation as well.
In addition, since this is such a widely known method of falsifying search engine criteria, engines such as Google and Yahoo! place web sites that find practitioners of this approach further down in rankings rather than higher. For more details about all of this stuff, go see what Shari Thurow, author of Search Engine Visibility has to say about it at http://www.searchenginesbook.com.
I’m sure there are plenty of SEO teams that following the rules, and if you dwell on that side of the fence, I applaud you for not falling into the pit of eternal web darkness that is governed by the red and miserly, scruffy goateed fella with the horns and the forks.
If you are a client, be sure you’re working with an SEO team that has your best interests in mind. Dishonest Search Engine Companies — beware — because your inhuman days of befouled code bloat are coming to an end. Your Satanic jig of baboonery is now officially up.
Dave Fletcher is a Founder and Creative Director of theMechanism, a maxi-media firm in New York City and London. He tends to get carried away with stuff like this and promises that if you look close enough, there is meaning to his otherwise interpreted madness.
Aug 18 | Posted by Dave Fletcher | Add a Comment
Whilst sifting through some of the cosmic debris posted on one of our clients’ messageboards, I was reminded that the old way of community building on the web has been jerknifed by a cuckoo convergence of spammers and advertisers, all of whom are smarter than the average bear and uglier by far.
The silicone-enabled funk that’s stinkin’ up the place is being force-fisted into your happy little “net-hood” by unlovable machines doing the will of evil nerds, leaving one to believe that we humans have finally fallen face first into the dirt that delivered us. Each time we come up with a new way to combat this nonsense, the other side becomes smarter and more difficult to repell. There are more than enough geniuses, who instead of using their fecal brain matter for ceasing global warming or researching a cure for HIV, are holing themselves up in subterranean lairs and perfecting methods to push the garbage we never want directly in front of our orbish head googlers.
The messageboard as a “community-building” tool has finally been retired, becoming the hapless dodo of the net. Messageboards were once glowing condos of conversation everyone wanted access to, organized into delicious little morsels of chatter. Now, despite a number of computer filtering systems pre-installed into your favorite messageboard application, ads for viagara and vicodin are showing up and enraging communities — causing a mass exodus from the comfy groups they’ve constructed with their idle yippity yap, and leaving them as soulless advertising wastelands.
The real problem is not in the means of pushing Scheiße at us — it’s that members of the advertising community have foolishly come to believe that these guerilla tactics actually work. By cramming ads for stuff we don’t want down our throats or planting spies to tout the latest software or wonder drug in our community boards, they think we’ll actually knock each other down to read them quicker than a Tickle Me Elmo sale in the 90’s. As far as I can personally see, we don’t. But according to the IAB, there are a lot more advertisement-lovin’ monkeys out there than smart ones. Quarterly online ad revenues are close to 4 Billion. While a large amount of this revenue is undoubtedly from the advertising banner systems that surround our content, I can’t help but believe that somebody has to also be paying a merciless group of evil coders to stuff messageboards with crap at the same time.
So where do we go from here? Bloggers have created close-knit and personal communities of fans and foes with much better spam blocking software under their hoods. Perhaps, in due time, all of the web will be a big advertisers wonderland, supported by television programming and controlled by Net Neutrality laws. Someday, communities may actually return to the outdoors, causing a resurgence of parkside beatings rather than the safe, yet calculated verbal assaults occurring online daily. My fear is that the next generation may actually turn it’s back on this wonderful medium that we’ve collectively made billions of dollars designing for. It’s not too far from the truth right now. I hear paintball is making a comeback.
All I’m asking for is a little more honesty in the neighborhood, and I’ll consider moving back into a supportive, online town where I belong. Until then, I’m off to Central Park to clobber the nerds who inspired me to write this drivel in the first place.
Dave Fletcher is a Founder and Creative Director of theMechanism, a maxi-media firm in New York City and London. While he lives most of his days in the non-virtual world, he promises that if you look close enough, there is meaning to his otherwise interpreted madness.
