Tara over at graphic design blog started a Design Bloopers Competition contest a few weeks ago.

Below is what I decided to enter, against my better judgement. What would ‘better judgement’ be? Bury the incident and pretend it never happened!

About six months ago, while I was still in the employ of an agency and attended office daily, I got a call from my wife. She said that the partnership she was entering into with a local fashion designer had come through and she now needed a logo — by the evening, if possible!

I was in the middle of a ton of stuff, but figured that if I pushed this task, I’d get hell when I get home. So I thought about it for 10 minutes, had a sort-of-obvious idea, found a roundish font (Bauhaus) and went to work. My wife’s name is Batul and the fashion designer is named Umar. He’s more prominent, so I knew his name was going to come first. The symbol was going to be UB in lowercase letters — ub — followed by their respective first names.

15 more minutes editing the letter shapes and I was done with a B&W version. I sent her an SMS telling her it was done and to check her mail. She checked and messaged back — “Looks great. Thanks” . I got home and she told me she wanted it to be blue and green. This is what it ended up looking like.

The next day, she got someone in her office to create the bags, labels, tags, etc and the art was sent for printing.

That was that.

About a week later, I was at work where a visualiser and copywriter were working independently of the rest of the department to come up with some concepts and layouts. I walked in the conference room to check on them and saw a full page ad printed in the Dubai newspaper, Khaleej Times.

I stopped in my tracks. I looked at the paper a little closer. I crapped my pants. I then caught my breath and moved on to find out how they were progressing with their task.

This is what I saw.

Tara announced the results a week ago, and it turns out that no one produced, or admitted to producing, a gaffe as superb as mine!

This is by Rick Poyner. It’s an article in Print Magazine about how design blogs are generally low in quality.

The biggest single problem with blogs as a medium for writing is the very thing that bloggers tend to love them for: the lack of editors. It’s naive to imagine that you can just sit down at the keyboard, shoot from the hip, and hit the target unaided every time. There is no writer who doesn’t benefit from good editing, and it doesn’t matter how long you have been writing. Anyone who has worked on a longer text for publication knows how much work it takes on both sides to produce something fit to print. Some of this effort has to do with larger issues of content and the development of a strong argument; some of it with the details of copyediting.

This is by Khoi Vinh, on his blog. He sees it from both sides — he first disagrees and then agrees with Poyner.

It’s a bit like complaining that YouTube has yet to produce an equivalent to “8½.” Which is to say, so what?

I found it interesting to read about something I’ve just started doing. Maybe I’ll try harder to write better.

I just read, a day or two late, that Microsoft bought aQuantive for $6bn! If Google paid $3.1 for DoubleClick and MS paid nearly 2x that for the #2 firm, then I wonder if Yahoo’s going to view its purchase of Right Media for $680m as enough.

Also, I remember reading about WPP buying up 24/7 Real Media earlier this week and wondering why the big agency groups (WPP, Omnicom, Interpublic, Publicis) hadn’t been more active in this climate.

I’m not fully up to speed on what’s been happening the last few days, so if anyone can summarise, please comment. Thanks.

That’s what I hear someone replying when the client, Hanif Jewellers, picks up the phone and calls their ad agency to ask what the hell happened.

At one point or another, we’ve all made mistakes. Big ones, little ones — we’ve all dropped the ball. This one though, is pretty hard to let go because it’s really obvious. I bet you that no one would have missed it if the girl’s face had turned green!

All I can hope for is that there was a client-requested last minute change to the headline and it was given to a junior person with weak English skills to hurriedly enter without any time to re-check (run-on, I know). Inexcusable still, but at least one can form some sort of explanation.

To be honest, when I looked at the new Sitemeter logo, I immediately thought it was a knock-off of the Cisco logo. Upon looking at them side-by-side, they’re different enough for me to not make strange faces and wonder aloud, “Why?”

From what I recall about the history of the Cisco logo, the new one is meant to be an update of their original logo which was a depiction of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. At least, that’s what I remember reading.

The Sitemeter logo bears relevance to its statistics and chart roots, so it fits fine, but it does look a little generic because of the (too large) Myriad type that’s become all to common. I must admit, though, that it’s an improvement over that Rubik’s Cube lookalike thingey they had before.