Archive for the 'rants' category.
Jul 3 | Posted by Dave Fletcher | Add a Comment
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.
Jun 10 | Posted by Dave Fletcher | 3 comments
Monty Python’s Flying Circus, a comedy sketch show broadcast by the BBC from 1969 to 1974, was conceived, written and performed by Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, and Michael Palin. Little did they know how ahead of their time they were with their homage to SPAM, a canned & precooked meat product made by the Hormel Foods Corporation.
Revisiting this sketch this morning made me further appreciate the sketch’s melodious repetition as I deleted another 1575 Spam posts from my email box. If you get a lot of Spam, I highly recommend watching this video. It will ease the pain of dealing with this unruly menace. If you’re on a Mac, I recommend SpamArrest, which does a pretty good job of learning (with your assistance) what to keep and what to mark as Spam. Finally, if you’re eating dinner, I recommend feasting on anything other than SPAM…
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 admits to having tasted SPAM as a youngster, but cannot recall how sick it made him.
Apr 2 | Posted by Jeffrey Barke | Add a Comment
It's old, true, but this amazing Steve Ballmer mashup just came to my attention…
Source: YouTube
Mar 10 | Posted by Dave Fletcher | 1 Comment
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.
Dec 4 | Posted by Joshua Ingber | 2 comments
… Yet, there is no crying in baseball, and I am not sure there was ever a time in history when it was socially cool, outside of Russia, to play chess. There are other unnatural mysteries that confound me, like why people use Sacajawea coins or why there wasn’t a sequel to Dances With Wolves. Billy Joel’s words ring true, “surviving is a noble fight”.
The upward trend in interracial marriage suggests there is hope for the world. Yes, maybe we will all sit by a pool on a sunny day wearing hyper-color T-shirts, sipping on bubble tea without the bubbles. Until then, we survive. And for those us who are finishing the race, we look back at the two basics which sustained us: hope and good design.
Hope may be dashed in some parts of the world with the ongoing war, the ever growing gap between the rich and the poor, and the writer’s strike, but that is short-lived. For all that hope requires is a flashlight strong enough to beam through the darkness. Then people dream again of pools and bubble tea.
Design is a far more fragile matter. Our sense of quality comes from design. A well designed argument enriches our lives, a well designed hair style can inspire a generation, and a well designed automobile can help attract the opposite sex. Unfortunately, an argument can be shattered with bullets, a hair style can be combed over, and an automobile can be destroyed by a jealous lover. Without design we’d have no sunny days, no pools, no hyper-color shirts, and no bubble tea, as these were all inventions of designers. (Thank you G-d, for the sunny days).
So this holiday season, hug a good designer. Because if design dies, we pin our hopes for survival on hope itself. And I ask you this, what would we hope for?
