“I’m always amazed how artists working completely independently can create something so similar. It’s happened to me, and apparently, it’s happened to Slingshot. Add a dogwood on top and you’ve essentially got the City of Prince George logo.”

This is what he means. Here’s the logo for the City of Prince George side by side with the logo for Fenchurch, a skateboard-clothing company:

For those of you who don’t know (and I’m not surprised there would be those who don’t, since it’s impossible for me to find a link on this  [update: link is here]), the City of Prince George’s logo is a dogwood^thusly:

“After submitting many ideas and sketches for the Fenchurch logo, the arch design was conceived. There are many ideas behind the design, the first being that it comprises of two mirror images of the letter F. It has a very strong and solid feel and its architectural forms are vaguely reminiscent of the arches and stained glass windows found in churches and the main one being a graphic representation of the train tracks of Fenchurch Street Station.

The logo is in no way pictorial or literal and therefore does not limit the the products that the company produces, it has already experimented with shoes as well as clothing and offer many accessories that are not necessarily related to clothing. By creating a logo that was in a way anonymous it means that Fenchurch is not limited to the clothing market alone.”

But even Fenchurch is not alone. It seems Mr. Petriw brought the similarities of the two logos to the attention of the designers, who, according to Mr. Petriw’s Facebook page responded:

“Ah yeah, you know since I did that logo in 2000, I’ve seen several that are similar. Must be zeitgeist! Or maybe because it’s a form that can represent many things. The worst one for me was when I went to Paris two years later and walked past the 30 year old Les Quatre Temps mall, check it out: – thankfully that’s been knocked down now and they have a completely different logo.”

It’s a pretty interesting case study of a strong design being used to represent different things. Anybody else have records of similar motifs?

• Apparently, I’ve reached the end of Facebook… http://post.ly/vslV #
• Day two of installing new floors: for Labour Day we face the smaller, but more challenging, hallway. #
• Using power saws. And hand saws. Manly. And tired. #
• There are far too many wasps in our house. #

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Next time we do renovations, she is staying in a cage.

ginger + wasabi = wasabi dog

One of the things I like most about Firefox is the add-ons, in particular the custom search bar over in the top right corner. It allows you to search Google, Wikipedia, YouTube, and any number of other services directly without having to navigate to the website first– a real time-saver if you spend any length of time using this sites for research or otherwise. While my search bar has long been customized with everything from a creative commons image search to the Hype Machine, one frequently navigated site that has always eluded me is CBC Radio 3. It’s a great resource for finding songs by and information about independent Canadian artists, but I don’t always like having to visit the site in order to find an individual artist page. So today I decided to take a small amount of time and figure out how to add it to the sidebar. Fortunately, it was easier than I thought, and should take you no more than a couple of minutes. Hat tip to Digital Inspiration and Firefox user Dr. Evil for pointing me in the right direction.

1. Find the “searchplugins” folder. On my Mac, it was under Library > Application Support > Firefox and then in my personal profile. In PC, it is supposedly under C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox. It may differ for you, but a search should get you there.
2. Create a new document that allow you to save an .xml file. The easiest way to do this is to open one of the .xml files that are already in the searchplugins folder. If there are none, a Text Edit (Mac) or Notepad (PC) document should do it.
3. Paste the following code in the blank document:
   <SearchPlugin xmlns=”http://www.mozilla.org/2006/browser/search/” xmlns:os=”http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearch/1.1/”>
   <os:ShortName>CBC Radio 3</os:ShortName>
   <os:Description>CBC Radio 3</os:Description>
   <os:InputEncoding>UTF-8</os:InputEncoding>
   <os:Image width=”16″ height=”16″>data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAABAAAAAQCAYAAAAf8/9hAAAAj0lEQVQ4jZWTyxEAIQhDaZdelx4swrt7wgnZrB9mvCh5BFQbIh4zuVSYEvaIuTJ6hAQZipv7FPWI0dzlHkKMK6uKeMZOCqC53wN4UGk7rarWMP8DYBEOE2ewBKAYg8VLB9jOtYM/R9sZZKKyiu0UAD4ivEKGKEB5B5jAYmxBAnKTqx8/ZSar+99+JgU6+c4vlgvWYfhlDH0AAAAASUVORK5CYII=</os:Image>
   <os:Url type=”text/html” method=”GET” template=”http://radio3.cbc.ca/#/search/?q={searchTerms}”>
   </os:Url>
   </SearchPlugin>
4. Save it as “radio3.xml” in the “searchplugins” folder.
5. Restart Firefox, and you can now search the CBC Radio 3 website directly from your Firefox toolbar!

I’m sure there are variations on doing this, and it’s also possible there’s a way to do it Google Chrome, so if anyone has other tips (or if you run into problems), feel free to leave a message in the comments below.