2008 was a hard, hard year for designers, throughout which I often thought “what is AIGA doing for me?” For an organization devoted to supporting the design profession, as a designer I was not feeling a lot of support. Well this week I saw that Ric Grefe actually answered that very question and had some good advice to give at the proper AIGA site. That article linked me to the aforementioned Shel Perkins story, which I stopped reading after he gave explicit instructions on how to separate an employee’s livelihood from their life.  Taking the “live” out of “livelihood” — that’s a joke I should have written into the comic right there.

The STEP Reader’s Choice voting system is a complete and utter atrocity visited against mankind out of a mixture of malice and laziness. If the American electorate were set up in this fashion we all would have elected Mit Romney. I fielded two votes for the 36-Point-related poster (see our sidebar — it’s a sentimental favorite) from two different user accounts. I briefly considered setting up a third, but the pain was too great. The gallery system is overstuffed, completely unorganized, and poorly implemented: you cannot link directly to a piece to promote it; entries shift around in seemingly random fashion so they are next to impossible to track; and with only 20 entries per page and a grand total of 274 entries, it takes 14 pages to view everything, and even then you have to click through to each piece to see it in any detail. So that’s almost 300 clicks if you want to be an informed voter — more if you actually want to vote. I weep for the people on the last few pages to have gotten their letter of acceptance only to be buried at the discretion of the STEP staff under a giant pile of shit UI and 273 other entries. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, if you’re going to create a gallery of design, go all the way, or don’t go at all.