Wednesday, August 31, 2011

Still invisible after all these years

When the Information Design Association was started in the early 1990s, one of the things I remember discussing was the invisibility of our specialism. In the Yellow Pages, we had to go under Designers, Advertising & Graphic.

One early success was to get a category created in the Design Effectiveness Awards, run by the Design Business Association. It survived a few years, but has disappeared now.

I was reminded of this when applying for a savings account with Santander (or Abbey, Bradford, Bingley, Alliance & Leicester, as I think they were once called). 

They wanted to know my occupation, but it was back to the bad old days.


Thursday, August 18, 2011

Dissertations online: what's that all about

Searching for the British Library's online database of theses, most of the Google links were to services that offer to actually write your dissertation for you. Perhaps everyone else except me knew this is how you do it, but apparently you get the grade you want or your money back, and all the work is done by PhDs or Masters graduates, and tested with plagiarism software...






But you gotta love their student-friendly office opening hours.

What year was that?

Leeds, August 2011. People still queue for buses in t' North.