A Logo Romance

It’s time we told you about our boyfriend. We haven’t mentioned him before, which is kind of incredible, given how much we think about him. But it’s true: our company has a boyfriend. And he is awesome!

Our boyfriend is the Dosa Man. The Dosa Man runs a dosa cart on the southern edge of Washington Square Park, a few blocks from our office. When the weather is warm, he sets up shop and starts selling his dosas—a delicious South Indian pancake made from rice batter and lentils and filled with wonderful vegetables and spices.

We aren’t the only people who love the Dosa Man. He has many admirers, and the line to buy lunch from him is always long.

But even so, the Dosa Man wants to grow his business and spread the word online through new branding. When he mentioned this to us, we jumped into action. After all, this is what we do for a living.

So we took some time and designed him a logo. We thought it was pretty cool, and we sent it to him.

He didn’t end up using it. Dosa Man is his own man, and he marches to his own drum. He settled on a different logo. The one we made is above, the one he settled on is below. We’re sad, but we still love him, and will never stop going to him for lunch.

As we think more about it, we realize that Dosa Man has taught us an important lesson about being a marketing agency. Sometimes, your aesthetic doesn’t match that of your client. Sometimes they see things differently from you. And that’s ok. In the end, having a good product is the most important thing, no matter how you package it.

Thank you, Dosa Man. We will never forget our time together.

Magic Emotions

So we saw this Wired video review of Magic, the new text-based delivery start-up in San Francisco, and felt conflicting emotions.

On the one hand, Magic feels like another example of the cheapening of labor in America, a trend that is turning the country into a high-tech luxury hotel where vast armies of room servants cater to the whims of a lucky few, all for low wages with zero job security. It feels entitled and elitist, like Google’s bus service or that time those tech guys tried to reserve space in a public park.

On the other hand, how cool is it that you can text a stranger and have them turn up at your door an hour later with a Mexican wrestler’s mask? It’s the kind of thing that would have blown our 8-year-old, lucha libra-obsessed mind.

So, like we said: emotions.

Net Neutrality, Naturally

Overall, we’re neutral about a lot of things—string theory, cashews vs. almonds, the artistic value of the “Finding Bigfoot” franchise. But one thing we’re not neutral about is Net Neutrality. We’re nuts for Net Neutrality. After all, the Internet is the arena in which we make our magic, the worldwide street fair in which we peddle our wares. If Big Cable has its way, that wonderful street fair will become an awful big-box mall, with only three or four chain stores that all sell the same products, and anything funky or interesting will be priced out. The internet will turn into Manhattan, for God’s sake!

The FCC is voting new Net Neutrality rules TODAY, and while things are looking good for the pro-Neutrality cause, no one should get complacent. Help seal the deal by visiting sites like the one below and making your voice heard.

http://demandprogress.org/

A Camera Falls...

 A camera falls from a plane, plunges several thousand feet through the air and lands in a pigsty. If we remembered more from our college Lit courses, we could make some fancy reference to pride coming before a fall, or the flight of Icarus, or Lucifer in Paradise Lost “hurled headlong flaming from th’ Ethereal Skie.”

But as we are all just day-jobbing swine, incapable of looking further than the next paycheck, we’ll just go with: “Cool. Cool. Cool. Cool.”

Polar Vortex

Polar Vortex

Winter Storm Janus (really? Are we naming blizzards now?) hit New York City (and lots of other places) yesterday, resulting in some beautiful photographs (and lots of other things). Here is a prime selection, put together by @Gothamist.

DML Man of the New Year

Sir Patrick Stewart, who continues to not give a flying f*** about his reputation as a distinguished old man of the theater. Case in point: appearing on an obscure podcast and spending a good ten minutes imitating the different accents of British cows.  Either he is Buddhistically enlightened or smoking more weed than Seth Rogan. Regardless, we send him a solid “Ave Caesar!”

NYC is the Matrix

We could talk about how these aerial shots of NYC, courtesy of Gothamist, feel like stills from a new Star Wars movie, or like what Neo saw when he tried “the jump” in the first Matrix film. Or, we could be slightly less nerdy, and say they represent a stunning new angle from which to contemplate our urban spaces. But that sounds academic and pretentious. So let’s just say that these shots are epic, and leave it at that.

Fox In A Yellow Dress

Another piece of NYC nostalgia, this time via the Facebook page of Dirty Old 1970s New York. While the straight men in the office are sure-‘nuff diggin’ the fox in the yellow dress, all of us are loving the old school touches—including the vintage traffic light, garbage can and bake-shop store front.

Saul Leiter's Allure

We’re afraid to click on the link to more of these pictures—because once we do, important work will not get done. Unimportant work will not get done. We will forget to eat, and will only tear our eyes away from the screen with the most extreme reluctance.

Photos by Saul Leiter

via

photojojo

The Yurting Kind

When we die, we hope our obituary contains a line as awesome as: "No one did more to promote yurts than Bill Coperthwaite."

(via Cabinporn.com. Photograph by A. William Frederick.)

Keep Your Nose Clean

The fellows (and ladies, presumably) of Laughing Squid recently posted a link to a book of dogs licking their noses.

We particularly like this because our office is run by a queen pitbull bitch named Gouda: she pretty much calls the shots around here, and she licks her nose a lot. The dog above is not Gouda, who you can see below.

DML Man of the Week

Because if Francis Albert Sinatra wants to drink a scotch while riding in his helicopter, then he will drink a scotch while riding in his helicopter. (Notice that none of the wind kicked up by the rotor knocks his hat off his head. It wouldn’t dare.)

Miley Surprised Us

Miley Cyrus has finally done something that legitimately shocks us. She collaborated with the Roots on an a cappella version of We Can’t Stop and she totally crushed it.

Life's Unattainables

When we saw this picture (reblogged from ffffound), our immediate thought was “We want some of that, yes please.” But there was no brand name or model number included in the post, so we were dubious. Was it just another of those “design concepts” that people are always posting, super-desirable products that tantalize us but are not actually available for purchase?

A little research reveals that the answer is both no and yes. What you see above is the Legno turntable, produced by the Italian company Montegiro. You can actually buy it. For $13,240. In other words, you can’t actually buy it.

We have heard of aficionados who spend $30,000 on just the right kind of speaker wire, so who knows? Maybe $13,240 is a bargain price in the rarified world of high-end audio. But until Walter White breaks into our house and leaves a huge pile of cash on our ottoman, we’ll have to add the Legno to the long list of life’s unattainables—right up there with Beyonce’s phone number and the power of flight.

Grandpa Tells It Like It Is

The sass-talking senior citizen is a comedic staple that goes all the way back to W.C. Fields, and we’re cheered to see that it is alive and well in this great new ad from Oscar Meyer. Strictly speaking, the message here is that Grandpa should should be more polite in his comments. But it’s pretty clear what the people who created this spot actually think: Grandpa is a total badass.

(Extra credit to the child actor for his look of confused disgust after Gramps gives him the-birds-and-the-bees lecture.)

Cool (but bad for you)

We like the concept of this combo iPad / toilet paper stand, selling at CTA Digital and pointed out to us by the good people at Gizmodo. But we are against it 100%.

Have you ever spent 40 minutes on the toilet playing Minecraft on your iPad? Of course you have. And you have probably followed it up with 10 minutes of painful running in place, just to get the feeling back in your legs and buttocks. That shit is unhealthy. Suppose you develop a blood clot, and it travels from your leg, up through your ass and into your brain, giving you a stroke? Imagine trying to live that down in the rehab facility. No, no, no. Anything that makes this dangerous behavior more convenient must be rejected out of hand.

http://gizmodo.com/5982101/secretly-we-all-want-this-toilet+paper+holding-ipad-stand

Fan-boi!

tscp:

22 | From Phones To Tablets: 26 Apple Designs That Never Came To Be | Co.Design: business + innovation + design

Though a quick search of the internets tells us that “fanboi” is a derogatory term, we still have to admit that we are fanbois (is that the plural? Fanboix? Fanboii) of Apple products, and get all weak in the knees when Cupertino releases something new.

So we were tickled, in our fanboi-ish way, to see this collection of early Apple designs—computers that were never actually built, but which would have been awwwsum.

Icon-o-schmertz

One day, someone will figure out a way to express complex literary and philosophical ideas through the use of icons. In the meantime, we will have to content ourselves with the many shades of first-world misery encapsulated in this chart.

You can check out the original (in Spanish) here:

http://bit.ly/YCswcN

Ugly As We Wanna Be

Photo: Ugly Models Agency

It’s great when stereotypical notions of beauty are stood on their head, when the haughty world of whisper-thin models, metrosexual stylists and cold-hearted Vogue editors is chucked out in favor of real people looking as flawed, but beautiful, as real people do. When a size 8 is considered as sexy as a size 2, when…

Oh wait. No, that’s not what’s going on here at all.

The UGLY modeling agency is a London-based “character” modeling agency. Which is to say it takes unusual, funny-looking people and hires them out to magazines, agencies and stock-photo houses to add either comic relief or contrast.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with that, as far as we’re concerned. Even “characters” have to make a living, after all.

But why call your agency UGLY? I mean, we know why: it’s a good gimmick and it gets you attention. But isn’t it sort of reinforcing the idea that models are beautiful and everyone else is hideous?

What’s that you say? You didn’t start your company to upend the ridiculous beauty standards of the fashion industry? You started it to make money?

Well, if that’s your attitude, we only have one thing to say to you: can we get in on the action? We’re a pretty odd looking lot. Our VP for Sales is missing two front teeth, half the copywriters have uni-brows and don’t get us started on our bearded receptionist Lurlene. Can we FTP you some head shots?

http://www.odditycentral.com/news/ugly-model-agency-redefines-fashion-business-standards.html

Happy Martin Luther King Day

Gene Herrick / AP

So often, when we celebrate Martin Luther King, we do so with somberly inspirational images, as if to underscore the gravity of his life and achievements. So to buck that trend, we decided to post this snapshot, in which the refreshingly youthful civil rights leader looks like a swing-era crooner getting mobbed by adoring bobby soxers. (Actually, he’s leaving a Montgomery, Alabama courtroom after a legal victory, and the bobby soxer is his wife Coretta Scott King.)

You have a dream?  Baby, what you’ve got is style.