Saturday was the date of the Boom! Gala and Exhibition at the Mint Museum here in Charlotte. The show is alternately hosted each year by the Charlotte and Raleigh AIGA chapters, and this year accepted over 500 entries from all over the Carolinas. We are proud to announce that Mode had 6 pieces selected of the 96 in the show, and ended up taking home three gold, one silver, one bronze, and one merit award! The calibre of work across all the entries was extremely high, so we are honored to have received these recognitions. More »

Everybody at Mode already knows me as a freak for live music, (even if they still seem shocked when I tell them I went to two concerts in one night, or that I risked my life by traveling all over Florida and Georgia with 6 complete strangers to see multiple shows on the same tour), but my last concert experience really warrants a post from a visual and interactive standpoint. It also doesn’t hurt that I got a few decent pictures. The “Lights in the Sky” tour ups the ante for a band known for its constantly re-invented live aesthetic: Nine Inch Nails. Very few musicians are so invested in the visual side of their band that they’ll hire a full-time art director, or label every track on a 4-disc instrumental album with photos instead of titles. More »

I’m always noticing work that flies in the face of everything I’ve learned in school. It can be downright annoying to mentally critique everything you see, a common problem among designers, but what I didn’t expect was to start appreciating some very ugly work for the same reasons. It could be a personal factor of coming from a school and city over-saturated with design students, as you can only see so many clever phrases set in Helvetica before you start WANTING to be assaulted by some crudely scrawled electric type with no rhyme or reason, just to keep your sanity and challenge your eyes. We do things so cleanly and deliberately here at Mode that I get the occasional urge to stretch type at random, maybe throw in some neon unicorns. You know, just to mix it up. I guess many designers regularly embrace this type of stuff from an ironic standpoint, and normally I’m appreciating it only for its comedic value too, but sometimes it really is perfectly appropriate. More »