Forget farting cows, look out Tiger Woods!

You gotta love this one.

As the old left wing works itself into a lather with its latest dire warning about the future of the planet, a new culprit has emerged from an unlikely quarter – the misty highlands of bonny Scotland.

This time, the  finger  of  climate change warriors is not being pointed at householders who, God forbid, dare to turn on an electric light, or run a warm bath. And, carbon-laden farts by Highland cattle have also escaped the eco-wrath, as have Haggis factories and woollen mills.

Instead, the self-appointed saviours of the Earth have turned their sights on that most Scottish of sports, the ancient – and some would say sacred – game of golf.

Apparently, when scientists scoured the floor of Loch Ness in search of a prehistoric creature, they found golf balls – hundreds of thousands of them.

And, although that sounds fairly logical to me – who doesn’t like getting out the old two wood and whacking a ball Happy Gilmore-style over the nearest water hazard – it has a downside that is offending the fun police.

The story is that golf balls in the water – in fact, anywhere in the wild – are a green no no. And, in case golfers dare raise a question,  there is, of course, the usual alarming report.

It seems that the Danish Golf Union says golf balls  may take between 100 and 1,000 years to decompose. And, as the balls break down, they release toxins and heavy metals into the environment.

So, rather than questioning whether monster hunting was valid scientific research in the first place – especially in light of their own  …”so much carbon, so little time” mantra – the army of green saviours now has its knickers in a knot because it says golfers leave behind an estimated 300 million golf balls in the United States alone every year.

I sincerely wish them luck in finding all those cunning little suckers that are sliced or hooked off the fairways every time I’m on a golf course. Hang the  toxins … I just want the balls back, so I can hack them into the bush again the next time around.

Ian

Print designs face a ‘yawn’ factor

There is a depressing sameness about printed material.

Take a good look at advertisements, newsletters, flyers, and the thousands of official and promotional forms that are regularly thrust under your face. Increasingly, they look alike – the same designs, colours, styles (or lack of) etc etc.

I know it’s a long bow, but we could be forgiven for thinking that graphic design for print has run out of ideas.

It stands to reason that there are a finite number of ways that type, images and logos etc can be arranged on a page and a document.  That number is  high, but it’s still finite.

But, I think it also has a lot to do with the evolution of desktop publishing programs that ‘dumb down’  output to  a bland template style – somewhat like website content management systems.  Using these modern ‘out-of-the-box’ publising programs is not rocket science ….. and the finished product increasingly seems to be reflecting that fact.

Of course, technology and the social web in particular offers salvation for the print graphic designer.  The only problem is that this is a whole new ‘Gen Y’ world in which the ‘First, we need a logo’ thinking so central to Marketing 101 is redundant.

Inventing a new font every month and stretching the uses of Photoshop to its limits may keep the wolves at bay for a while, but like the tide, it will be hard to hold back the impact of a wave of mediocrity.