Hench Archives

The nogg chicken house is a new and modern piece of sculptural art – yet functional and beautifully well engineered too.

nogg was designed and built by Matthew Hayward and Nadia Turan.

The nogg is made from Cedar wood, a naturally anti-bacterial wood that weathers superbly outdoors and in all weathers giving each nogg a unique and individual appearance after time. The designers, Matthew Hayward and Nadia Turan created the nogg because several friends had ugly unsightly chicken houses which they felt detracted from their gardens and weren’t welcoming, let alone for the chickens who inhabitted them!

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We’ve been working on a new site for an iPhone developer, and ran into some performance issues with Safari and Chrome. Looks like Webkit has trouble with text-shadow..

Safari and Chrome have a bit of trouble with text-shadow..

So there I was, merrily developing a new site for a client.

The three product panels were fine, but I wanted to add a little animation to reveal further information, so I turned to my favourite javascript library, jQuery.

Using jQuery to move things around, fade them in and out and generally spice things up is pretty common these days, so I was surprised when I ran into a few performance issues testing the site in Webkit-based browsers Safari and Chrome that I hadn’t heard about. Both were having a big problems with all the motion and fading, with some serious and unacceptable lag. Firefox and IE didn’t share these problems, so I wracked my brains trying to work out what might be the cause.

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Innovation on a simple idea is something that most people appreciate. When it’s done well it can give you that horrid moment of realisation where you think to yourself, “Why didn’t I think of that?”

Enter the folding plug, an innovation created for the very purpose of making every single user of the standard UK plug hide with embarrassment and shame, in the knowledge that they didn’t think of it before.

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Here at Hench, we have a love of many things great and small. Included in that are cars. We’re confirmed car enthusiasts who appreciate great design, and we understand that when it all comes together as a complete, considered package, an object combining design, functionality, and a little bit of magic is created.

2010 BMW 5 Series

It’s no secret that I’m a self-confesed lover of BMW’s. Within reason of course. I don’t like their old 70’s tin cans, and I don’t think much of their current range or bloated heavy and fairly vulgar designs. However, there is always hope that their design direction reverts back to that of their more beautiful designed cars and sure enough the new head designer, Adrian van Hooydonk, has done so. Obviously, I couldn’t miss out on an opportunity to talk both about BMW and design now could I?!

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The Ray Ban “Never Hide” campaign has been around for a while, and, whilst I think the execution is really interesting and the art very cool, I’m not so sure about the accuracy of the message..

Ray Ban "Never Hide" campaign

Well here we are. I didn’t really want to make my first post something negative, but I keep passing these ads every day and I must admit I’m a little baffled by them. They’ve actually been around for a while, but I’m going to indulge myself regardless.

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