As with any development team, we are constantly looking for better tools to do our jobs. Personally, I have messed with Flex for a while but never really had the inspiration to create anything with it. That changed recently when we began development on a new e-commerce platform for Jacobson Floral a national floral goods wholesaler. More »

Hailing from Beantown and making a much anticipated visit to the Queen City, POSTGIG is a national exhibition of original music posters curated by design industry royalty Clifford Stoltze. the show features original works by Modern Dog, Aesthetic Apparatus, Patent Pending, the Small Stakes, Seripop, Hammerpress, the decoder ring and many more. join us opening night April 17th, 7–9pm at green rice gallery in NODA where Clif will be on hand to discuss the exhibition as well as his new book “1000 Music Graphics” published by Rockport.

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We are excited to bring our good friend and colleague Brian Mah to town this month in conjunction with the AIGA for a presentation at the Mint Museum. On February 26th, Brian will lead a discussion centered around the diversity of work created at Imaginary Forces and how design plays an integral role in each medium. More »

Obscured by the Mint Museum’s Warhol exhibit is a showing of a different flavor, grandiose in its own right. The ‘Scene in America: A Contemporary Look at the Black Male Image’ is a collection of work of various artists who focus on concepts of racial identity.

The highlight of the exhibition [to me] is the artist Kehinde Wiley, whose ‘Philip the Fair’ larger than life piece marries the visual rhetoric of European classicism with representations of contemporary urban, black and brown male. It is a hint of ethnographic aesthetic that I too echo in my photographic work.

More on the art of Kehinde Wiley:
http://www.kehindewiley.com

More on the ‘Scene in America’ exhibition at the Mint Museum of Art:
http://www.mintmuseum.org/current-exhibition.html

Flex.org released a new multi purpose desktop utility for working with Flex. It was designed to show the capabilities of Flex as well as serve as a reference point for developers. It includes exhibitions of the various components available within Flex as well as code samples for how to implement them. More »

Let’s face it folks, the days of providing a singular fixed resolution website are soon to be over. With the onslaught of web capable phones hitting the market there has been a surge in mobile web browsing. What does this have to do with your company you might ask? Your beautifully designed website most likely degrades into a mass of text and unstructured content when viewed through a mobile web browser. As one might imagine this is very unattractive to potential clients and customers. They expect your site to be a reflection of your company’s standards and legitimacy. More »

Something that has fascinated me with the evolution of the web have been the ever changing methods in which users are able to describe content on the web. The idea behind describing content is a rather simple one. You can take an image, sound or video and use words to describe it. More »

“Various Artists”
Saturday, November 15th
5:00-10:00 pm

A live screenprinting event brought to you by Kitschworth & Ink Floyd. The event will showcase the designs of 6 artists that are based in North Carolina. Their original artwork will be screenprinted live on t-shirts and high-quality paper only available to guests attending this event. T-Shirts are $20 and Prints are $10. 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 »

Sprint just launched a new site to promote its mobile capabilities called “Sprint NOW“. In addition to a well designed interface and animations, it’s functionally deep. It’s essentially a dashboard full of really interesting and sometimes nonsensical meta type information from Doggy Daycare live video feeds to “Top Words Being Used Online”. More »

At MODE we are currently working on a branding initiative for the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art. In researching Andy Warhol, one of the artists in the collection, I was both reminded and newly informed about his fascination with Grace Jones. More »

At this point, it has been about eight months since Adobe released the 1.0 version of Adobe AIR. Since that time, there have been several early adopters of this product but the question still remains, “What is Adobe AIR?” More »

I am always intrigued and inspired when the standard approach or standard use of materials is questioned, once you force yourself to explore the alternative the results are often exciting and innovative. One beautiful and extraordinary example of this concept is GINA, the concept car unveiled earlier this year by BMW.

GINA is modeled after a Z8 Roadster, but they’ve eliminated the standard surfaces, door handles and lights, and have replaced them with a flexible fabric covering the entire car.The use of fabric allows BMW to play with the way the standard fittings work. For instance, the door no longer has to rigidly open outwards; instead it slides up, rippling the fabric in the process.

Check out footage of GINA

As MODE’s Interactive Director I’m constantly looking to extend our offerings beyond traditional web media into other channels such as desktop applications, interactive kiosks, and in the last year, mobile. At MODE, we look at mobile as another avenue that our clients’ brand can use to reach its target audience. 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 »