the COMMAND C design blog

It was gay pride weekend in New York and the Michael Jackson energy was FOR REAL REAL. You could hear his music pretty much at all times all weekend. Here’s a tribute mixtape for you all, there are some pretty incredible tracks, and you can download the entire set at the bottom of this post. We love you Michael, thank you.

I Want You Back - Jackson 5 Cover - Discovery

Beat It - Cookin Soul Kid Cudi Mashup

I Want You Back - Cookin Soul Lil Wayne Mashup

ABC - Salaam Remi Mix

Billie Jean - Biggie Smalls Remix

Dirty Diana - Dexplicit Remix

Rock With You - Cookin Soul Notorious BIG Remix

You Are Not Alone - Viking + CJ Milli Shooting Stars Tribute

You Rock My World - Feat Nas

I Want You Back - The Walk and Rogerseventytwo Remix

Scream - Dave Jam Hall’s Extended Mix

Man In The Mirror - Rhymefest

>> Download the entire set here.

… and a freight train running through the middle of my head.

The High Line project is definitely the best thing to happen to New York since Katz’s. I’ve been obsessing this thing for years, so upon opening a day early, I promptly secured a photo date with myself and the tracks. The High Line was originally built in the 30s to lift freight traffic up off the streets of the city in an effort to curb an abundance of deadly accidents between trains and street traffic. According to High Line history, 10th Ave became known as “Death Avenue,” and before the Line was airborne, men on horses aptly called “West Side Cowboys” would ride in front of trains waving red flags alerting traffic and pedestrians to get the hell outta dodge.

Old school photos courtesy: The High Line and Friends of The High Line.

The architectural design is stunning. The care taken to integrate the original structure with modern architecture and landscape design is overtly stated. Designed by James Corner Field Operations, with Diller Scofidio + Renfro, it’s as if the new park was hand-stitched into it’s original foundation; the new architecture is literally sewn seamlessly into the old as seen in the images above. The park winds with ease through the existing infrastructure, reminiscent of Venetian waterways.

Sundeck Water Feature/Sundeck Preserve: Unobstructed views of the Hudson along with wading area where water skims the surface of upper walkway, providing visitors with the opportunity to cool off barefoot. The water doesn’t exist yet. I’m okay with that. It seems like one of those better in theory than practice sort of ideas. My neurosis would thrive like swine flu in that shit.

The inaugural installation in the Chelsea Market Passage by artist Spencer Finch.

View down 14th Street, from The High Line.

Now you may compete, little flower.

10th Avenue Square: This step down viewing booth allows for a Sea World-like view of 10th Ave.

View from behind glass in viewing booth.

… or somethin’ like that. We’ve been hard at work this spring, here’s a lil’ snipet of what we’ve been up to:

Logo + website design for CareerPortrait:

Design + development of website for writer/blogger Jessica Valenti:

Logo design/business cards for WithStyle:

Logo design for Jeff Brody Injury Law:

Design + development of website for Reiff Insurance:

Logo design for Cardenphi Fashion:

Photoshoot for furniture designer Pete Oyler:

We make it look easy, don’t we?

- After this remix, forget Red Lobster.

Side A:

1. We Are Blind (Tone Tiger Remix) | Alaska In Winter

2. Better Things | Passion Pit

3. Breaking It Up (Pocketknife’s Loosefoot Remix) | Lykke Li

4. On Dancefloors | Metronomy

5. Boys From School | Hot Chip

6. God Has A Voice, She Speaks Through Me | CocoRosie

7. Brandy of the Damned (Mark Ronson Remix) (ft. Wale) | Nickel Eye

8. I’m On Fire (Bruce Springsteen Remix) | Chromatics

9. Hysteric | Yeah Yeah Yeahs

Side B:

1. How It Was Supposed To Be (Remix) | Ryan Leslie/Jadakiss

2. Brooklyn Girls | Charles Hamilton

3. That’s That | MF Doom

4. Broken Van (Thinking of You) (ft. Mac Lethal) | Cunninlynguists

5. Sky Might Fall (prod by Kanye West) | Kid Cudi

6. Don’t Forget ‘Em | Consequence

7. Bust Your Windows (ft. Glass Candy) | Jazmine Sullivan

8. Hypnotized (ft. Pack FM, Club Dub) | Cunninlynguists

9. She Came Along (ft. Kid Cudi) | Sharam & Patsy Cline

Download all of Side A here.

Download all of Side B here.

Please support musicians you like purchasing their music once in a while.

Could there be a better example of the power of design? After a month and a half on the market and a 20% drop in sales, Tropicana (thankfully) ditched the redesign of it’s packaging. What’s tricky about a brand like Tropicana is that it’s deeply entrenched in our good ol’ American identity–it’s not just an accessory, it’s part of who we are. So, when Tropicana got the great idea to re-brand itself with a more modern, web-influenced (minus the boobie top) look and feel, consumers would have nothing to do with it, despite the simple fact that not a thing changed about the juice itself.

The error comes in the form of re-marketing to the wrong market, not so much in the design just being bad (I mean…). When I saw the redesign, I immediately thought “Vitamin Water” – the color coded tabs, minimal, text based approach… But then I thought about who Vitamin Water’s target audience is, and it certainly doesn’t seem to be the same as that of Tropicana OJ. Vitamin Water belongs on the street, on the court, in the hands of hipsters and hip hop heads. Tropicana belongs at the family breakfast table, in a clear glass pitcher, in little Jack’s sippy–cup, at home. The ship started sinking the moment they tried to make classic cool.

Watch Peter Arnell, of the Arnell Group defending the tragedy here.

So what about Pepsi’s recent overhaul??? We know that people have a hard time with change, especially when it’s done for (to) them. Turns out, the Arnell Group is reponsible for this “upgrade” as well. The new logo/campaign isn’t winning hearts at such a rapid rate either, however, the response is much more varied and seemingly critical. My speculation is that a brand like Pepsi, which has a history of reinvention and modification, is a little more elastic, hipper too–it’s a brand that has had a clear evolution and has constantly had to reinvent itself, with Coca-Cola providing a consistent flow of healthy competition.

Also, can we talk about this?

We’ve gotten some pretty damn good SEO listings recently that we can’t help but share… my dad’s a genius. 

#1 of 92,100,000 pages containing the phrase “custom website design ny”

#4 of 2,550,000 pages containing the phrase “custom portfolio websites”

#2 of 292,000,000 pages containing the phrase “portfolio websites ny”

#3 of 88,700 pages containing the phrase “magento ecommerce ny”

#1 of 182,000 pages containing the phrase “custom websites for restaurants”

#8 of 409,000 pages containing the phrase “websites for boutiques”

#1 of 60,200 pages containing the phrase “portfolio websites for corporations”

Okay, put on your bib, this might make you drool a little. The talented and incredibly brave Jess Dobkin found us a few months back while looking for a team to work with on building a floor to ceiling online abode for her work. Dobkin is an award-winning performance artist whose work ranges from stage to street to hidden notes inside of library books that make you question topics like consumerism and gender. Trying to mold a website, a completely client managed one, around her diverse bodies of work, was a challenging challenge. Working collaboratively with Jess and Darren, we came up with a custom Ruby on Rails solution. Here are a series of frontend vs. admin screenshots of the site, we think they explain best:

www.jessdobkin.com
The homepage rotates upon pageload between these two images:

The admin section of the homepage looks like this:

This is the work page:

The admin section of the work page looks like this:

and like this:

This is the cv page, inside the about section:

This is how you would update it:

We we also hired by Fourth Wall Restaurants to re-brand and re-design the Maloney and Porcelli website.

Here’s what it looked like when we didn’t design it:

Here’s what it looks when we did:
www.maloneyandporcelli.com

You like?

The HOW Design Conference runs from June 24-27 and looks really frakkin’ inspiring. Unfortunately, no designer I know makes enough to warrant the $1035(early bird) registration fee.

Me and death, yeah, we’re like that. I’ve always had a fascination with it that has proven to be simultaneously self-tortuous and self-indulgent. This sort of thing, I am good at.  I have a handful of childhood (umm and maybe some teenage, okay and present day) memories of bizarre encounters with the postmortem. My tadar (taxidermy radar) has been active for a while now, and I’m completely entranced, but I do have some moral dilemmas, and maybe not the kind you’re thinking…

It was this recent NY Times story on Melissa Dixson (pictured above in her studio), and the mentioning of taxidermy ‘artist’ Sarina Brewer in a recent BUST newsletter I received, that finally pushed this post into existence.

It’s pretty interesting that taxidermy has not only made a nice little niche for itself as a trendy aspect of pop culture, but also within the art world. While I once felt the need to protect my inner deadly fascinations for fear of social ostracism, I’m now oddly comfortable exposing this side of myself. In fact, I’m thinking that it might actually resonate with some of you, could even bring me some keyword traffic. BUT, all that being said, taxidermy as art, just doesn’t sit perfectly well for me.

This post’s DNA can be traced back to the 2004 Whitney Biennial. I remember walking into the dark room mostly dedicated to Erick Swenson’s installation of a young snow-white deer scratching its horns on an Oriental carpet. Thought not exactly taxidermy per se, the piece inevitably brings forth the question of life vs. death, the beautiful vs. the grotesque. The work became a poster child for that year’s slew of new talent, and as far as I can see, kicked open the door for a resurgence of artwork based in animal oddities and the line between life and death. This, in my opinion, is great.

Around that time, I also remember the emergence of artist Patricia Piccinini and her Ethical Aesthetics. Her incredibly bizarre, nausea inducing creature creations reference the doll-ish, stuffed nature of that which was once alive. But they go much further than that. They are more aesthetic than scientific in nature.

These two artists are interdisciplinary in medium and hold tight to the aesthetics behind their work. One can’t deny the beauty in Swenson’s deer or the repulsion in Piccinini’s, ahh umm hmmm, ‘Little Helpers.’ But these artists’ work laid the ground stone for what is now a full on taxidermy movement. And my issue resides in the passing off of what I would call craft as art.

As far as I’m concerned, the line between art and craft resides in the idea. If someone has refined a skill to which they are now beholden and every idea they have is executed within the confines of that skill, it’s a craft. On the other hand, if someone has a raw idea, thinks about the best way to execute it and isn’t limited to one particular medium, it can be called art. I’m sorry taxidermy, I love you, straight up though, you are still a craft.

A happy client of ours recently thanked us with a gift certificate to Moss Design Store. The only item I really wanted was this (coincidentally by Melissa Dixson):

When I ask myself why I am so drawn to this creature, oh god I shouldn’t say this, the idea of company comes to mind. I imagine waking up in the morning and walking to the bathroom, passing this guy in the corner and saying, ‘Hey Buddy, morning.’ I’m also thinking about shock value and boundary pushing. I’m not thinking about the investment as a having post-dated Christie’s return. And neither should you.

On the other hand, German artist Iris Shieferstein brings some legitimate artistic discourse to the table. Through joining together different species and creating something entirely new (and ironically, dead), she successfully brings up questions of beauty, necessity, life, death, attraction/repulsion, fairytale, pop culture, and sexuality.

This issue brings forth the larger question of science in art and vice versa. I love science. I love art. I love it when the two converge, I love taxidermy. But I think the art world needs to be very discretionary about this notion of standard. A few months back I saw the Buckminster Fuller exhibit at the Whitney. I loved it, it was fascinating, but I didn’t think it belonged there. I think it belonged at the Science Museum. To me, it was more scientific than artistic and this is an important thing to keep in mind if we are to preserve the integrity of the art world.

There are no words…