Emperor Rudie

Eskimo Joe no dough

2007-11-02T17:01:00.000+09:00

Perth kids done good Eskimo Joe are running a design competition (and here).

It seems that after they have paid for all those things that rock stars need, they have no money left over to pay for design - but they will give you an iPod if you win! Thanks dad. After all design is just a hobby.

Our favourite is this little clause in the conditions:

Irrevocably grants to the Sponsor, its agents, licensees, and assigns the unconditional and perpetual right and permission to copyright, reproduce, encode, store, copy, transmit, publish, post, broadcast, display, publicly perform, adapt, modify, create derivative works of, exhibit, and otherwise use the Entry (with or without using the entrant’s name) in any media
throughout the world for any purpose, without limitation, and without additional review, compensation, or approval from the entrant or any other party.

We're wondering if EJ have ever signed a contact with that clause relating to their music. You may as well just give them the rights to your sister and mother while you're at it.

Really guys, thanks for the opportunity but we might be passing on this.

"And my my sense of pretension is from Up My Arse"

2007-09-28T08:51:00.000+08:00

It would appear that this season's look is "got dressed in the dark in the 80s".

This site is hilarious – gotta love it when Perth does 'cool'. Oh so cutting edge darling.

Pretty Vacant

2007-09-24T11:34:00.000+08:00

This is a classic.

Nathan Brown is an AFL footballer. Nathan has decided to start selling some t-shirts – nice for him. His incredibly eloquent philosophy is summed up on his site thus:

"Blackbyrd doesn’t make statements, we have no political or religious agenda, we just make cool tees that people can wear and admire. You can’t go wrong with a t-shirt, jeans and cons. There’s a simpleness to it, wear it well."

He is obviously doing all he can to dispel the stereotype of footballers as stupid.

So anyway, you take a look through the pretty, meaningless t-shirt designs on his site and you come across this:

Now, I don't know a lot about French history, but I am guessing that the guys involved in the May 68 student uprisings may find this shirt just a tad political.

To be fair, I'm sure that the French students had never heard of AFL either.

Two point oh, how boring

2007-08-26T10:18:00.000+08:00

When Modern Life is Rubbish published its 8 Web Design Clichés post last year it was an amusing read but it seems that Perth's web designers may have mistaken it for a style guide – if the finalists of the recent WA Web Awards are any indication, that is.

It would appear that to be a finalist you, nearly without exception, had to embrace that look where every button on the site looks like a nicely lubricated suppository and vignettes duel to create the impression that a site is actually the result of some insane blind origami master being let loose on a box of white and brightly coloured bits of paper.

And before you Code-stapo types start CCShitting in my comment section (save your typing finger, because I won't understand what you're talking about anyway), I understand that 'design' was only one criteria by which these sites were judged, but let's just suppose that they are somewhat representative of what the local interweb people consider good. (And save your breath; Emporer Rudie isn't some disgruntled web designer who wasn't recognised – just a random observer.)

It would seem that uniformity is considered good. It would seem that web designers really don't see a difference between gay issues and fleet management. This could lead to some very embarrassing moments when these designers get together for a few drinks.

Perhaps this is yet another symptom of a booming economy. Everyone has too much work on. Not enough time to think, so pick the easy solution off the shelf. Go to lunch.

It will be a pity if, when this boom is over, all we are left with is a sea of online ordinariness rather than a blossoming of creativity.

Hopefully this sample isn't really representative and there's an underground movement of interesting stuff coming out of the back alleys of Perth. While this is a perfectly nice site, is it really the best site that Western Australia managed to produce in the last twelve months?? I hope not.

Why reinvent the wheel when you can just steal one

2007-08-15T22:13:00.002+08:00

Perth is a one-paper town.

And unfortunately that one paper, The West Australian, has steadily been heading further and further into the gutter over the last decade or so. But when The West suddenly became an advocate of Form's Creative Capital initiative and started publishing intelligent opinion pieces about the future of creativity in Perth by Charles Landry, it seemed that there may in fact be some light at the end of a very long dark tunnel.

It would seem however that creativity in Perth is merely being given lip-service by The West if they are to be judged by their actions.

Last Saturday The West launched its brand new magazine insert. Entitled W, the magazine's content is a collection of syndicated and locally written features with the usual mix of arts/lifestyle/food stuff you'd expect from a Saturday mag. And, in fact, the written content is actually rather good – a significant notch above the usual dross The West tries to pass off as journalism.

But – and this is a rather large but – while I'm assuming (probably rather naively) that The West would not tolerate plagiarism of the written word, it would seem that the same doesn't apply to art direction.

W is the uglier result of a crossbreeding The New York Times Magazine with its sister publication, the fashion supplement T.

Luckily The West shares a similar traditional blackletter masthead style with The Times so the 'designers' at The West could pretty much steal the entire design without having to alter much at all.

While I completely understand the role of influence in design, especially the inevitability of being influenced by the brilliant art direction of The New York Times Magazine when designing a Saturday mag, this really is a step too far. The West is clearly attempting to profit from the talent and hard work that many editorial designers have invested in The New York Times' publications over the years.

The subtext of this plagiarism is the contempt in which the editorial staff of The West must hold their readers. The idea that their ignorant Perthite consumers wouldn't have any idea that they had ripped off two of the most famous pieces of editorial design of modern times (the assumption is we ignoramuses have probably never even seen a copy of The New York Times let alone bothered to read it) is the real insult here.