There’s no denying it: the economy has gotten shitty. While we over at Object Adjective seem to be going strong, landing contracts and continuing business as usual, you can hardly surf the news feeds on the web without reading one article or another about how unemployment rates have risen to claim over 232,000 jobs since the new year, making this the largest recession since 2003. Unemployment rates at the time of this post are a whopping 5.1% and continuing to climb. It’s a bit scary for all of us here in the US of A, even with the prospect of getting that stupid tool out of the White House.

But the reason I am writing this is not so much to gripe about economics in general as it is to promote a good friend of mine who has lost her design job to the current recession.

Her name is Vara Pappas and she is a hell of a print designer and a damn good fashion photographer as well. This past Monday she received notice that she was being downsized by her company due to a lack of incoming work. They ensured her that she would be awarded 2 weeks of severance pay, but this is hardly a treat when you live in San Francisco, one of the most expensive cities in the US. She needs to find a job that will give her the opportunity to do what she does exceptionally well, and fast.

So, if you’re hiring a print designer, or you know someone who is, check out her website.

Note: She’s also willing to take freelance projects for the time being as well until she finds something more permanent, so don’t miss out on the opportunity to work with her.

I’m juvenile. The reason I say this is not because I want you to think less of me, but to warn you that while you may be able to extract an ounce of serious commentary from the content in this post, the side of me that still giggles at potty language is at the forefront of my motivation.

While browsing around various design sites, I came across a rather positive review on The DieLine of the latest packaging design from the San Francisco cleaning product company, Method.

Le Scrub and Lil’ Bowl Blu mark the company’s entrance into “deep cleaning” products and round out their line of bathroom products.

While I agree that there is a sleek and modern loveliness to these bathroom cleaning products, I at once had to snicker at the bare naked fact that the two depicted in the image above look very referential to a butt and an indeterminate colorectal organ shape.

The Tub Scrub product is probably the most hysterical as all I can see when I look at it is what appears to be an abstraction of a set of ass cheeks clenching a sponge. I can’t possibly be alone in this sentiment. And while the toilet bowl cleaner is more of a traditional shape for this sort of cleaning product, it’s smooth gentle curves are less “Clorox toilet bowl cleaner” and more digestive organ.

Of course, asses and bathrooms kind of go together, so maybe Method’s packaging design was deliberate…but probably not. I can’t picture a bunch of ad and design guys sitting around deciding to make their clients’ products look this anal…but what do I know? I’m a web designer, so my expertise seldom crosses into dealing with consumer products.

Of course this happens in web and print design as well. We’ve all designed something that was phallic, or contained a prominent undesirable shape of some sort. If you’re lucky someone catches it before you submit it to the client, or worse, release it into the world for all to giggle at….

A few weeks back, along with many others in the development community, I wrote in response to Microsoft’s announcement that IE8 would implement version targeting, a means of back-dating a site so that it doesn’t break with new releases of the browser.

While my views expressed in Version Targeting: Defaulting to the Past to Spite the Future? were primarily favorable of the new technique, I expressed my concerns with Microsoft’s decision that IE8 and all other browsers to come would default to rendering as if it were the previous release of the browser if the meta tag, which looks like this:

<meta http-equiv=”X-UA-Compatible” content=”IE=x;FF=x;OtherUA=x” />

was omitted, rather than in the current up to date standards mode. Perhaps the pressure of the masses in the standards community, Microsoft has caved and agreed that the default rendering engine of IE8 will now favor standards compliance rather than giving precedence to the fear of breakage. To quote their March 3rd press release:

Microsoft Corp. is now configuring the settings in Internet Explorer 8, the upcoming version of its browser, to render content — by default — using methods that give top priority to Web standards interoperability.

While their official position is that they have reoriented their company focus away from proprietary winner-take-all competitiveness and toward interoperability, a lot of us (those not so trusting), posit that they most likely just couldn’t stand up to the pressure coming from those aligned with the web standards movement.

Honestly, it doesn’t really matter what contributed most to their decision. Either way you look at it, progressive support for standards is a good thing. In the end, with IE8 now in public beta, it seems the IE team is finally looking forward like the rest of us, instead of shoving their proverbial heads up their own asses. Standards will be supported by default.

You know the scenario: you land on a website for Business X and beneath the logo is a banner that fades from a slogan over a flat color to a pair of suits shaking hands with big ear-to-ear grins. Nothing says “corporate cliche” like bad stock photography. Sigh.

We all know how cheesy this is. And yet clients still ask for it and so many designers still succumb to the pressure to create that corporate stock look. It doesn’t have to go down like that. As the designer, you have the ability to just say “no” to bad stock photography and corporate clip art. A little creativity, and you can create a web presence for your client that will actually set their company apart from the boring template web design look. It just takes a little extra push, and a desire to get beyond.

We’re so used to seeing the same stock photos on everyone’s site - I’m convinced that there are only 100 people who pose for stock photography, but they are featured on probably 200,000 homepages each, working on a laptop, sitting at a conference table, talking on a mobile phone. Everyone knows they don’t work at this company because you’ve seen the same people on dozens of sites the same day. Doesn’t it make more sense to do something to set your client’s company apart a bit? Maybe create something a bit more personal and original?

Make it Custom or Don’t Bother

I’ve always been a fan of the Ellis Labs solution to the company homepage. The illustration of the founders looking geeky in their lab coats with beakers makes for an amusing and stylish sense of humor about themselves. Friendly and cheeky, it makes you feel like you know these guys, and doing business with them and supporting their products comes natural. They’re the geeks next door, and you dig ‘em. At least I do.

Another site that makes great use of graphic illustrations to set themselves apart from the competition is YoDiv (otherwise known as You Design They Develop) - most outsourcing firms have really bad faux corporate looking sites, but these guys have the right idea - They are marketing their services to designers after all…

Investing is Simple (IIS) has a great homepage graphic that sets them appart from the usual investment website - I think investment and banking sites use more crappy stock photos and corpo clip art than anyone usually. I’m not sure pink was the best color choice, but the graphic definitely adds a spark to investing, an activity most people think is about as exciting as watching grass grow.

As of late, Jeremy and I have been working on some pretty neat illustrations for a variety of websites, including an online poster art contest for STD awareness.

As well as our sweet-toothed logo for our new side project Popwit, an online arts and culture magazine we’re working toward launching in teh next month or two:

(note: we’ll be looking for contributors in the areas of art, sound, architecture and design, but I’ll make a formal announcement later on when we’re nearing public launch).

Anyway, my point is simply please, for the love of God (or whatever greater power you believe in) - DON’T MAKE ANY MORE WEBSITES THAT LOOK LIKE THEY CAME AS PART OF THE CORPORATE STARTER KIT. This is not a way for the client to come off as conservative and business-like, it’s a way to look cheap, dated and unprofessional. It’s up to you to tell them this - to give them something better for their money. Illustration is only one component - original photography, custom icons, product demos, typography and graphic treatments can all play nicely together to create a visually distinct web presence.

Additional Inspiration

Can’t get your creative juices flowing? (ew…I hate that analogy…sorry) - Anyway, here are some illustrators’ sites I dig. Maybe they’ll inspire you as they have me:

The Alamo Basement - Kelly Korvec’s illustration portfolio.

Kev Adamson - An interesting mix of hand drawn and digital illustration

Kun-Sung Chung - Digital Illustrator’s portfolio

Alberto Cerriteno - Digital Artist

If you have any other illustrators you like or illustration inspiration resources, feel free to add them into the comments section (yes, it’s okay to link yourself as an inspiration resource - if you’re good I would love to see your stuff).

I spend all day looking at typefaces, carefully considering which to use and where, how much space to give the letters, the words, and how to balance the visually artistic aspects of type with pragmatic legibility and order. You would think that come the weekend, enough is enough. Nope. My rental du jour on Sunday was Helvetica, a documentary about the most common typeface in probably the entire western world. And it was pretty damn good.

The timeliness of this documentary is perfect, and not only because helvetica reached it’s 50th birthday in 2007. As the film points out, we’ve entered into a period in history where the tools of design are accessible to the public and social networking sites like Myspace allow the user to create their own designed pages as a means of fabricating their own identity. Since everyone has become an amateur designer, what better time to cast an eye on the most prevalent font in the world? Read the rest of this entry »