DEPECHE MODE: SOUNDS OF THE UNIVERSE

Depeche Mode. Sounds of the Universe Album Cover, 2009.

Subject matter ideas:

1) Pincushion: Depeche Mode songs are usually synonymous with "pain"
2) Pick up sticks: the universe is a messy place that is inherently out of order
3) Sound emanating from the earth
4) Breaking out of boundaries
5) Songs being broadcast from a speaker (with a relevant colour assigned to each song)
6) Depeche Mode's position in the world as a band: they're not quite "in" and not quite "out" of fashion; none of the lines themselves are fully in the circle nor out

The Russian Constructivist look of the cover works very well with the industrial sounds of the album. The colour gray for the background is a great choice: it strengthens Depeche Mode's position as the moody "depressed mode" band. The only thing holding this album back is the choice of using the sticks in place of the "D" and "M" since these graphics detract from and compete with the impact of the main image. Also, the tracking is too loose. Make that kern tight, yo!

FRIDAY CATBLOGGING

SMARTER THAN GATES AND CRISPIN

I know how to make Microsoft take down Apple to become a market leader both in brand perception and sales. It's easy. You merely have to position Microsoft as what it is: non-intuitive. Therefore, one needs to be smart in order to use a PC. And since macs are intuitive and easy, you can be as dumb as a child to use it. It's a matter of simply capitalizing on people's inherent desire to be intelligent.

DEEP THOUGHT

The sheen on this web button is not a real sheen so does it really matter where the light is coming from?

WEB 2.0 GREEN LIVES ON

Free detergent! It's free! Come and get it! No, silly -- it is free of dyes and perfumes. Well then why is the "FREE" visually separate from:

DERMATOLOGIST TESTED
free of dyes and perfumes

The main problem with the product is the misleading packaging. Usually when "FREE" appears on a product it means that the quantity has been increased and you're getting more of what you buy at no additional charge. This Tide product changes things up for our cognitive schema so that we now have to recognize a second idea of free: the idea being unencumbered by things we may or may not want in the ingredients. Perhaps more appropriate copy could be "FREE OF" since as it is right now the idea of free is in its own box independent of the box explaining that the product has been dermatologist tested and is also free of dyes and perfumes.

We are aware, however, that P&G is on top of their game, which means that everything on this bottle has been carefully examined and considered.

Do you wonder why P&G chose to make this sensitive skin product line colour coded with green and not some other colour like pink, light blue, tangerine, etc? Turns out that detergent is on the black lists of environmentalists everywhere: detergent not only pollutes our water supply, but some studies have shown that detergents trigger the growth of deadly drug-resistant bacteria. It is highly likely then that lime green was chosen to piggyback on brands or movements that are already connected to that colour in consumers' minds. One of which is the entire green movement, which is founded on the idea that we should be conscious of our natural environment and our carbon footprints. With consumers being environmentally friendly now more than ever, Tide needs to make sure they maintain market share despite being not so friendly to our water supply. Seeing a detergent product on a supermarket shelf with a contemporary light green cap and label reads as evironmentally friendly due to current consumer broad colour associations. This connection is strengthened by the subtle addition of making the bottom copy and recycling symbols green as well. Moreover, the connection is further broadened by a subtle graphic on the label: the green and white circles seem to be two-dimensional soap bubbles that make one think green soap bubbles = green detergent. The sum effect is that it reads as a green product if you do not scrutinize the label and just scan the shelf at the supermarket.

Tide is also trying to keep their target age skewing young. To do this they tapped into a colour frequently called "Web 2.0 green", which entered our lexicon by being the most popular colour to use for logos of online-based companies by web designers c. 2007.

While this may be a bit far-fetched, one could even claim that Tide is also piggybacking on Zipcar, which is an hourly car rental service ("wheels when you need them") that caters to mostly young, hip urbanites who need to run errands. Zipcar's logo and visual identity use a very similar shade of green (note: image of the Tide Free product above is close to the actual product colour, but is not exact).

P&G is a very smart. The use of green has been carefully considered. The bottle is a clean white. There is a modern pattern of circles on the label. And most importantly, they haven't changed their iconic logo just for the sake of being relevant.

BLUE AND ORANGE

So bourgeoise.

SPOILED ROTTEN

Neel, Elizabeth. Spoiled, 2008. Acrylic on paper, 19" x 24".

Contemporary American artist Elizabeth Neel (b. 1975) takes forms and paints them not just in an an aggressive abstract style, but uses their inherent qualities to flesh out a style. It is as if the content, or external, is created according to the internal.

There is a lush quality to Spoiled that is evident in the silken thick ribbons of the dark purple and pink paint along with the dainty round dots on the lower half of the painting. From afar it seems like a bouquet of flowers. Hydrangeas, perhaps. The light background contributes to this delicate, feminine feel. Linger for a while, however, and the painting seems to turn itself inside-out with gory blots that resemble the spilled organs of a body cavity, which are impaled by a vomit-coloured greenish yellow line. There is no doubt that Neel's application of paint is violent. Consider the title of the work, and it becomes obvious that something that is pretty on the outside -- female, flowers, pinks -- becomes grotesque from the inside and suddenly the spoiled has, indeed, spoiled.

DEEP THOUGHT

It's 2009. The economy has gone to hell. Americans pride themselves in driving a VW or Prius or BMW. Not the all-American Ford or Chevy. We spend our vacations in Venice or Barcelona or Paris. We romanticize and idolize Europe and exotic islands. Not our own country, which offers history, wooded forests, rugged mountains, rolling plains, and the like. Americana is dead.

And then, thanks to a popular TV show, Britain's Got Talent, we hold up and glorify the overlooked, the unexotic, the neglected, and the ugly in making a shining star of the talented singer, Susan Boyle. Although she is from across the pond, we Americans celebrate this woman and her willingness to get out there, show her stuff, and triumph when all of the odds were against her. Susan Boyle. Hope for the dejected.

CALL THE MOVING COMPANY

Lorcan O'Herlihy Architects. 7917 Willoughby Avenue, West Hollywood, CA. 2009.

While this is a condo building and not a single-family home, it is a big leap forward for multi-unit urban architecture. The pièce de résistance in this building is the push and pull effect created by the inset balcony mezzzanies and how the balcony system reverberates throughout the whole building.

Most architects will attach a balcony onto a flat building side and be done with it, but Lorcan made the balcony the crux of the building's design. Here we find that the outdoor area is still part of our living space, not annexed onto the outside. Not willing to compromise on lost space, the area that is taken by the balcony is added onto the other side of the building thereby creating a "pushed" effect whereby part of the building hangs. Even though the building is asymmetrical it remains balanced by weight, but not just by the building shape alone; windows assist in achieving this feeling of stability. The long window on the ground floor takes up as much area as the upper three windows and anchors the eye.

Again, since the balcony is the locus, the interior space makes use of an intererior -- and seemingly inverted -- balcony on the top floor. Sunlight enters into an atrium in which function could allow possibilities like a private garden, breakfast nook or sunning space. The balcony is again echoed in the interior by means of constructing the staircase to include a mid-floor hallway balcony that looks down onto the lower floor.

Why can't New York get some of these?

DEEP THOUGHT

AT THE CORNER OF DUANE AND READE

Duane Reade desperately needed a face lift, but this new visual identity is more of a sag. The kind of sag that comes when you find a great new moisturizer that promises to uplift, vitalize and energize but after a few weeks, you aren't feeling anymore like a model than you do a broomstick.

Considering that two of Duane Reade's main competitors have red logos (CVS, Walgreens), it was a good idea to move away from the red and blue and embrace black and white. The latter combination is a solid way to imply "luxury," however I'm not so sure how a place that sells everything from toilet paper to $2.99 mascara can even be considered luxurious. I think it may have been better for Duane Reade to use black and white as a way of saying Duane Reade = New York City and thus fit in with every New Yorker's visual dictionary that defines "nyc" as Woody Allen films, grit and dirt, Gotham City, and toughness. This would foster a sense of consumer pride about being connected to their city, and emotion is the way to really connect people with brands.

The type treatment and design of the logo belies this would-be New York synonymity by shoving a thick sans serif "D" into a refined and classic serif "R" within an unappealing disfigured circle. There's a pupil-painful disconnect that arises from the "D" seeming to be vertically squished to be at the same height as the "R" so that they both fit between the base line and the cap line, which underscores how much the negative space has largely been ignored. And why do these letters even need to be contained in a circle? New York is city of hard lines, squares, and ninety-degree angles, not soft and rounded circles. Even the "R" seems to want to break out of this horrendous design with its leg extending out on the right. And the "D" -- its corners are cut off all for the sake of fitting these letters inside a circle. The human eye is naturally drawn to circular objects and we find them visually harmonious and pleasing, however our eyes are struggling to complete and round out the circle in this goofy logo, yet we cannot and so it feels wrong and unsettling.

The one thing I do like is keeping the "DR" to maintain an association with doctor and medicine, but the type is more reminiscent of a Fashion Bug or 99¢ store logo than a respected New York pharmaceutical institution; this new logo is inconsistent and flimsy, not concrete and stolid.

Command+W it.