Target's new Des Moines-focused boards compelling metro residents to buy groceries in the 'burbs aren't new but they've finally hit a level of wrong-overload in our offices. The "Fresh from East to West" board heavily features non-regional avocados, lemons, bananas, and sparks a little bit of cognitive dissonance in a city with a pretty solid agricultural foundation.

But it's "Make a D-Line to fresh" that really grinds our gears. Since the D Line doesn't even deliver passengers to Ingerdahl's, invoking the name of the downtown-only bus line to make a pun about suburban grocery giants is wonky, and it smacks of a lack of local cultural knowledge.

If you were asked to write better copy to activate a "Target and Des Moines: together forever" spirit, where would you start?

Market Day organizer Cat Rocketship dropped us a line this weekend to let us know the indie craft expo is now accepting applications for its fourth annual Black Friday sale on November 23. Rocketship says:

"We have an indie-minded crowd who loves hip, trendy, weird stuff. Our vendors are nice, smart, and funny, which makes the experience itself fun even if you don't sell a thing, but the Black Friday markets are always buzzing with shoppers looking for Christmas swag. If you are a "part time" maker, this is a good market to dip your toes into -- but it'll be nuts!"

If this sounds like the way you want to spend the day after Thanksgiving, apply now on the Market Day site.

We heard this week from the boys ungendered nouns at 8/7 Central, who sent along a couple of new projects. Let's handle them one at a time, because there is so much to talk about here.

First off, did you know local architecture firm G.E. Wattier is now Slingshot Architecture? We didn't, either.

And thank the gods of design because their old logo, name, and splash page were A. awful and B. completely uninformative. We've seen the logo all over the metro and never really connected with the fact they were an architecture firm.

8/7 Central eases us all into the transition with a nice drop-down over the old site at gewattier.com:

Oh, how classy. It makes us feel all warm inside about this shake up. Now, on to the new site:

As is often the case with 8/7 Central's new design, much of the news is about how awful the old design was. It's not that the new site isn't slick, well-made, or intuitive -- it's just that it's so much easier to focus on the negative, isn't it? Today, in celebration of the talent that is 8/7 Central's team of robots designers, developers, and copywriters, let's review the success of this site, point by point.

1. That logo. We begin here because we are sure this will be the most contentious point, but the backwards/forwards treatment of "slingshot" works for us. Does it work for you?
2. The tone. The text, the photo, the text overlay ON the photo -- they all communicate quite clearly that this is a firm who wants to care about what they do -- and they want us to know they care. Though after we've stared at the front page for this long, the folks gathered around the conference table do look a little too serious for architecture. They begin to look as if they are handling a much more serious situation.
3. Information underload. The pixies gentle designers filled the page with just enough -- not too much. Often new sites suffer from wanting to tell us too much at first glance.

How's all this new golden architecture goodness striking you today?