Every morning for several months, I get out of the Canal Street 1 stop and I walked past a fenced in area between Canal and Grand. I was curious about what was brewing behind those closed fences but I could never quite get a good look. Then a few weeks ago the fences came down to reveal… junk, or stuff, or art or something. I couldn’t quite figure it out. It clearly had to be some kind of art installation because it was too weird to simply be a park. Read More…
We will not be posting about Adobe’s announcement that Flash Professional CS5 will allow developers to build applications for iPhone and iPod touch, instead we are supporting CreativePro’s even more awesome post.
See how I did that.
In light of the recent news, Tom’s (@wanderingspace) triumphant return from vacation and the greatest lunar announcement of all time. We made him a quick little website present: themoonhasfuckingwateronit.com.
Fall is here and you know what that means, back to school time. This fall, Tim and I will both be teaching at School of Visual Arts. Tim will be teaching Basic and Advanced Flash Weekend workshop classes and I (Matthew) will be teaching an Advanced Flash Independent Project Actionscript class.
The Independent projects class is always a satisfying class to lead. It is geared towards those who already have a solid foundation in Actionscript 3 but want to expand their portfolio while reinforcing and discussing solid approaches to creating more robust Flash projects. Unlike the standard Advanced Flash Class, we start building projects right away. If we need to cover any of the basic principles of ActionScript 3 & OOP, we do it in the context of the projects at hand. This semester we will be focusing on sound, interaction, video and a little 3D.
As always, more info about Chopping Block classes, workshops, teachers and boat loads of unlabeled example/demo files can be found at school.choppingblock.com.
Today is my 1-year anniversary at the Block. It’s also dangerously close to a few Block birthdays. In celebration of these monumentus events, I decided to bake a cake that (kind of) looks like our logo. Also it incorporates our odd love of oranges and it’s sitting on a wood cutting board so we get the wood obsession in there too. The cake is lovingly made with white and yellow cake, vanilla frosting, fondant and cocoa powder. I topped it off with some marzipan oranges with sugar leaves.
This is the 2nd cake I have baked for my fellow worker bees that the block. Previously I attempted to bake a wedding cake when Leo and Beatriz got married and we had a reception at the office.
On a sentimental note: I am honored to have been able to work in this fantastic place for a year now. The Chopping Block is a very special, dare I say magical place that I look forward to escaping to every single day.
Chop Shop is excited to release its latest tee design, “Filter Heroes”. The original concept was actually hatched during The Chopping Block’s formative years in the late 90’s. At that time the studio repeatedly re-worked their company website to look like anything but a design studio’s website. The first versions included a Nascar site, a vintage horror B-movie site, a golden age of spaceflight (recently featured here) site and a boy scouts site. Around the time of the fifth iteration of our site, Flash had arrived and allowed designers an opportunity to really present something online that stood apart from the larger majority of sites. Before that, the most anyone had to boast about were 8-frame gif animations and perhaps some javascript rollovers to really blow people away. Read More…
Not only do we design for rock bands like Phish and They Might Be Giants, but sometimes we also work for “The Man”. Our long-time client Council on Accreditation, utilized our powerful design & development team to deliver a website for The Department of Defense that’s goal was to, “expand the number of civilian quality child care spaces available to military families”. The Site provides the essential information needed by a potential candidate through a simple, easy-to-understand interactive map. All the user needs to begin the process of finding quality care is a zip code.
For one whole year, happiness guru Gretchen Rubin pursued a set of resolutions: to get more sleep, quit nagging her husband, sing in the morning to her daughters, stick to an exercise program, start a blog, imitate a spiritual master and keep a one-sentence journal. That experiment became a blog which in turn became a book and has now been transformed (in collaboration with our studio) into an interactive toolbox. Read More…
Today is a wonderful day the block. Leo, one of our own, got himself hitched and we couldn’t be more thrilled.
So you can imagine my excitement when I came across this on etsy. This adorable painting clocks in at a miniscule 2½” × 3½” but it is really quite beautiful even at such a small size. It’s actually a digital illustration printed on stretched canvas and it comes on it’s own tiny easel (apparently affixed by elves) as well.
I love the idea of robots in love, it seems to have a greater meta implication that maybe we are all robots…in love.
Grab yours at ArtIsBetterTiny’s store on Etsy for only $12!
Not as long ago as 40 years ago, but just a little over 10 years ago – The Chopping Block adopted the look of NASA for one of our online incarnations. More specific our adopted look embraced the era of Apollo in hopes that a little of that former astro-glory might rub off on our small New York graphic design studio which was at that time only about a year old. So we thought it appropriate on this 40th anniversary of the touchdown at Tranquility Base, that we revisit our own journey through cyberspace and our small tribute to the historic landmark that is Apollo. Read More…
See more at 
