Headless Hollow posts, categorised for your convenience and enjoyment. On this page you’ll find posts vaguely related to Design.
Fourteen and counting …
Sweating Mac
[click image to enlarge]
This is the ‘Sweating Mac’, an illustration I did way back in 1989, and one of the first illustrations I did just after learning how to use Adobe Illustrator 88 (as it was called back then). As primitive as it looks today, this got me a lecture spot on a big Desktop Publishing Conference at the time, which was pretty exciting for a designer fresh out of college. Not many people were doing illustration work with computers yet, so this was pretty revolutionary stuff.
Here’s to the next 14 years! If you’re interested, the Universal Head site is here.
Design deception
I’ve got nothing against business wanting to do business. We live in a capitalist society after all. But some businesses seem to think that any method of deception is justifiable in their quest for profit. And to me, this kind of thing is pretty much on the same level as the endless spam emails that fill your Inbox every day trying to convice you that a patch will make your penis bigger.
Take for example, the letter I received yesterday, shown above, from our friends at Reader’s Digest. You’d be forgiven for thinking that this was actually an important document of some kind, covered as it is with a despatch code, a ‘deadline compliant’ tracking reference number, a security reference number; not to mention the big red bar with DO NOT DESTROY on it, and the official-looking brown paper the envelope is made of. There’s even a printed ‘hand-written’ touch—’information protected’.
What does all this mean? I’m special! It’s for me, and me only! If you tear open this tissue of lies the crap continues inside— the letter repeats the ‘deadline compliant’ graphic, but this time to look like a green sticker; the endless reference numbers continue, the letter is personalised throughout. Someone didn’t return their Sweepstakes entry—and that mistake cost them $50,000! I’ve passed two of the three stages necessary to win up to FIVE HUNDRED THOUSAND DOLLARS! There are lots of CAPITALS and bolded words! My neighbours—apparently—are looking in their letterboxes in vain!
Deception, outright lies, pre-meditated, cold-hearted fakery. Everything about this piece of communication and design is intended to fool the recipient, whether they be someone who can immediately spot the deception a mile off and immediately throw it in the recycling bin where it belongs, or a geriatric pensioner with no money to spare living with the false belief that Reader’s Digest is still an organisation of integrity.
If they came to me to design this letter—I’d tell them to bugger off.
Photos update
Updated my Photos page with a few still life images I created some years back.
A new year, a new Universal Head
January is a-wastin’, but happy new year to you all out there. I’ve been putting off my first entry of the year as I wanted to start with a bang—I’ve finally got around to totally revamping my design business website: Universal Head. If you’re at all interested in graphic design, I do invite you to go and have a look around.
I’ve been in business for myself for nigh on twelve years now, and it was high time I made a site as clear and easy to use as this one. My last one was good for its time, but it relied too heavily on the bells and whistles of Flash animation. So for a while now I’ve been a little embarrassed to preach to my clients about ‘fast-loading’ and ‘easy-to-navigate’ and ‘standards-compatible’ websites, and then direct them to a business site that was anything but. That’s all been fixed. And I must admit, now that I get all of that work out in such a coherent format, I’m quite chuffed with the variety and quality of work on display (and this is only a small selection of many, many jobs over more than the past decade).
The object of this site is to present some of the best of that body of work in a clear, fast and easy to navigate format, and I think I’ve succeeded.
So anyway, let’s kick off this 2006 business shall we?
Company Dee Website
If you’ll permit me a bit of shameless self-promotion, let me present the latest site rolled out by Universal Head, my design company. Since I still haven’t had the time to redo and update my company site—it’s long overdue for the full CSS treatment—I might as well give new work a plug here.
Company dee is a corporate communications, event management and documentary production company. Universal Head designed (taking cues from the company’s existing corporate identity) and coded the site.
