Perhaps you are lacking direction in your design career, perhaps you are searching for a gift for the creative director in your life who has everything, or perhaps you’re an over-zealous finance person who could do without paying that huge creative director salary every month and are looking for a cheaper alternative. Whatever your situation, these stamps from Heather Phillips are for you!

Why not buy the whole set? After dispensing some of this advice amongst your woefully inadequate colleagues, your promotion to CD is sure to be in the post.

Of course kids, don’t forget that creative direction is dangerous and should only be attempted by a skilled and experienced adult. Do not attempt to creatively direct at home or unsupervised.

Found via Angus Whines, who in turn found it via Ben Terrett, and at that point I had to find out where to buy one.

This week’s fix comes from Victor Hertz, who has created these honest logos, which balance just the perfect amount of cynicism and levity for a Friday…

…see more in his Flickr set. Found via theinspiration.

Nice idea. Working in branding, I’m constantly reading the mythical ‘brand essence’ of various large corporations, which is always a statement which we are constantly reminded is never to be actually broadcast outside the building. I wonder how this exercise might go if you rendered various brand essence statements in the company’s logotype? Would the two match up or contrast horribly?

In case you ever wondered how it’s done, here’s how the big boys put together an integrated brand experience.

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…

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

Shame.

I’m currently finishing an identity for a law firm, so this website struck a chord.

Typography for Lawyers is a 13 primer by Matthew Butterick, a frustrated lawyer with a design background, in an attempt to show his colleagues the true typographic path. During my current project, I have indeed learned that typography is particularly important for lawyers, and also particularly hard to get right across a large business. Lawyers and designers are kind of the opposite sorts of people.

I found this via The Disciples of Design who reckon it might even be a good student resource…

…I haven’t got the guts to send it to my client though, the 200 pages of guidelines I’ve written will have to do…

I agree with Kirsty and Ben. This is brilliant and perfectly captures the tipping point of enthusiastic marketers inserting ‘social media’ into every available brand orifice. When it works it’s great, but the rest of the time it’s a lazy copout.

Soon to be joined by the pointless iPhone app – it doesn’t matter what it does so long as we get our logo on your home screen.

Anyway, here’s a sausages idea from before the internet…

…Walls liked it.

I saw this outside a pub at the weekend. I don’t think it was intended to be taken literally.

This made me laugh. From The Independent’s Dave Brown.

Although, if Gordon Brown is toast, David Cameron is crackers.

(Maybe that makes Nick Clegg marmalade?)

International readers: If you don’t know what this is all about, it’s now known as ‘Bigotgate’

The shortlisted entries for the Metro Wrap design competition have been put up on the D&AD blog.

The brief was to take over the front outside and inside cover of commuter paper Metro for one day in April to give Londoners an inspiring and motivational message to start their day. It’s a great that the space usually reserved for desperately flogging a new mobile phone or deodorant is given over to something needlessly creative for a change.

The entry above which I really liked is by Clare McKenzie/Clare Theophane, Miranda Bolter, Freya Defoe & Steve Hickory of The Partners and requires readers of the paper to fill in their own news and doodle their own cartoons. Lovely.

I’m afraid most of the rest of the entries were a bit disappointing, many opting to print a rhetorical visual pun on the front cover instead of actually getting to grips with the brief itself and thinking about how to communicate with Londoners, let alone what to say to them. One of The Partners’ other entries (they dubiously have 5 out of 10 shortlisted) is a newspaper printed like an umbrella, to hold over your head in case it’s raining that April morning. Yawn.

One entry has the paper covered in knitting. Presumably because the designer, erm, likes knitting. Each to their own.

Another entrant has printed transport upholstery patterns on the cover, which I heartily approve of, but I’m not sure how thinking my false teeth have fallen out, or that I’ve dropped a quid is going to set me up motivationally for the day ahead. If you were stupid or partially sighted enough to fall for it, it seems to me that it would just make you anxious.

Anyway, all of this is most likely sour grapes, because you see, despite my previous emotionally scarring experience of a Metro design competition, I entered this one too and my entry didn’t make the grade. I’ll dig it out and share it with you once I find my false teeth. Now where did I put them…?