These made me smile the other day. In my local newsagent, there are some foreign magazines, which have been imported and so need the English price marked on them. Obviously someone in the shop was armed with a biro and asked to mark up all the magazines so customers could see the price. Where is a good clear area on every magazine cover where the customer will definitely notice the information?

Yes, on the forehead of the person featured on the front cover.

Genius. Another design problem solved through a little original thinking.

If you’re curious about how websites work, you’ve ever selected ‘view source’ to see the guts of the HTML, or you have wondered about the ominous ‘back-end’, then wonder no longer. Back of a webpage reveals the inner workings of your favourite websites and gives new meaning to pressing the browser’s ‘back’ button.

The photographic paper detail on the Flickr one is genius. Send you own submissions to backofawebpage@gmail.com Found via davidthedesigner – Made me smile too…

Last week was judging week at D&AD, the week where the great and the good in the design industry get together and pass judgement on the work sent in by all the hopeful designers looking to gain their yellow-pencil-shaped approval.

Normally this is a closed process, but this year in addition to encouraging the judges to tweet their thoughts and publishing live lists of shortlisted work on their website, D&AD also offered to show groups round on judging day. Needless to say, I jumped at the chance and promptly invited myself.

I’ve been really glad to see this sort of openness finally coming from the D&AD. In the past, I wasn’t sure what to make of them. I was first introduced to the organisation as a student, and I diligently entered the student awards without really understanding the relevance of it all. There wasn’t as much information around back then, it felt like it was a mysterious private members club for the design elite, and not one a student designer who had come from a job on a trading estate in the West Midlands had any chance of ever belonging to.

Over the years I attended many of the lectures, and my various workplaces occasionally entered a project I had worked on, but the D&AD and I comprehensively failed to make any sort of impression on each other. It remained something out of my reach, the doors to the private members club stayed closed.

And then a couple of things happened. Firstly, a project I worked on, Vodafone Music, made it into the 2009 Annual. This was a big deal and seeing my name in the book alongside those of revered and respected practitioners was very satisfying. As a reward, I was given a year’s membership to the D&AD, and so little by little those austere doors started to open to me. (metaphorically of course). Things like Twitter had opened up design conversations too, and for the first time I found myself ‘talking’ to my design heroes directly, getting an insight into what lay inside the club, and a sense of the guts of my industry. I scoured eBay and started collecting the Annuals (at the time of writing I have every one from 1994 to present, plus a few others), studying the projects that made it – and those that won the coveted pencil – trying to figure out what they had in common. What was the formula for gaining entry to the winners’ hexagon, what was I up against?

This was the year that Matt Dent won the almost mythical black pencil for his UK Royal Mint coin designs. Something clicked. I had assumed these people were Dan Brown’s Illuminati, and I was going to have to learn their handshakes, but in actual fact you didn’t have to have studied at a legendary design school, have worked in a world-famous studio, or hang out on the yachts of monied industry figures to win a pencil. You just had to have a great idea and do it well. Matt was proof. That’s what all the winners had in common. (well, most of them anyway) Although both the Illuminati and graphic designers do share a love of ambigrams…

So flash forward to the present day, and there I am walking around in the Grand Hall at Olympia, looking at the work through the eyes of a D&AD judge (metaphorically of course). Some of it was already famous from the blogosphere, some was new and some things you could tell weren’t going to make it (including a poster of mine, but that’s another story). The judges were all debating the merits of things and there was an atmosphere of warm sincerity to the whole thing. Everyone was taking their duty very seriously. Work was laid out anonymously and each piece got an equal shot at greatness. It was inspiring, some of the work was phenomenal. I did genuinely feel welcome (even if I comprehensively failed to find the courage to talk to anyone important), and it seemed that newcomers with a good idea can get noticed in such an open forum. It’s tough, but possible.

I was left with a renewed sense of possibility and the feeling that the D&AD was there for me if I wanted it (and had the money of course) and that all it really was, was a bunch of nice people who all loved design as much as I do. Perhaps I had judged it unfairly, perhaps if I stopped feeling intimidated by it all I could get involved.

I managed to hang around, to be present at the launch of the new White Pencil, which was quite a moment. A selfless award? An award which it’s promised will recognise a good solution be it large or small? An award which only costs £25 to enter? £25 for a shot at making the world a better place? That sounds like real progress. I’m in.

The evening ended at the pub, which, outside of the studio, I guess is the natural habitat of any designer. It was a warm spring evening and the beer tasted good, but of course it wasn’t the real world. Not the real world of clients, deadlines, briefs and budgets, and not the world I live in during working hours. So as welcoming as the D&AD are, and as tempting as it is to get drawn into – it seems to me that the best course of action is to stay in the real world. To look past the famous names, familiar JPGs and talismanic pencils, and focus on doing the best work possible. To win my own and my clients’ belief first and just hope somewhere along the way, some people stood around in the epic Olympia Grand Hall of the future see something they like. If they do, great, and if they don’t? Well I can come back sharper next year.

So it’s business as usual then, but somehow now after seeing it all from the inside, anything feels possible. And the door’s ajar…

Tobias Bergdahl went to an Adrian Shaughnessy lecture and made notes. Except his notes weren’t the normal scribbly nonsense most of us manage, he formulated Shaughnessy’s “12 paradoxes of graphic design” into these: (and no, one of them wasn’t about going back in time to shoot your grandfather before he invents Comic Sans)

As it is now after noon, I can reveal this to be an April Fool.

Shame.

You know it’s been a bad week at work when even the equipment is trying to tell you something.

Happy Friday everybody.