A new ad campaign recently debuted, designed to increase infield attendance at Maryland’s Preakness Stakes. The campaign, created by Washington based creative agency Elevation, uses variations of the headline "Get Your Preak On" to play up the always festive, occasionally raunchy atmosphere of the infield.

When I think of Triple Crown horse racing, I think of two things. Well-heeled women wearing big hats in the stands, and drunken yahoos making jackasses of themselves in the infield. This campaign is clearly focused on the latter. To the dismay of some in the community, it appears to be working. Critics have called it everything from lame and embarrassing to staggeringly dumb. It may be all of those things, but it also appears to be working. Infield ticket sales are up 5 percent compared to two years ago.

While sexually suggestive ads are the lowest common denominator in the ad industry, this one succeeds in doing exactly what it set out to do. It gets the attention of the largely blue collar audience that has dwindled in the past few years and creates a memorable, albeit lowbrow impression.

We are so often focused on presenting the final product of our work, we often neglect the steps that got us to that end point. Very seldom do we as designers come up with the final answer on the first cut. It’s often the result of combining iterative solutions and making minor tweaks before a design is ready for prime time.

This is particularly true of brand marks. In almost every project engagement, we develop more than one visual solution. For brand marks, we generally insist on doing three. In order to capture the range of concepts and executions available, it’s a disservice to clients to develop any fewer. Typically, there is the safe solution, which is fairly close to what the client may be expecting. This is generally done to address specific directives for which the client has asked. The second treatment is a bit more expressive, a bit less “corporate”, while the third solution stretches the client’s comfort level a bit. All the designs should be wholly appropriate to the client and project brief, but each one taking a different approach to the solution, but conceptually and in terms of the graphic execution.

We recently developed a brand mark and website for an online resource for homeowner associations. The goal was to provide an open and inviting forum for condo association owners, board members and developers who needed a resource that provided relevant answers and solutions. 

We came up with the name Portico, from the Italian word for a porch leads to the entrance of a building or structure. In an earlier post, I wrote about how we had to begin anew when the name we came up with ran into a potential conflict with an existing company name. 

What began as a challenge turned into an opportunity, as we renamed the company Atrios, a spin on the Latin term atria, the plural of atrium. After clearing any trademark hurdles, we came up with the following visual treatments for the brand mark.

Someone once told me you should never do work with family, that it’s like oil and water, only more volatile. Sound advice, which I have long since heeded. However, some of my family members (read: my six older sisters) aren’t particularly good when it comes to taking no for an answer.

Needless to say, when my sister Regina approached me about designing a website to promote the release of her book, God Never Blinks, I had a few misgivings. The aforementioned concern about working with family was one. The fact that she and her writing are of a spiritual bent and I am a pure materialist was another.

My concerns were unfounded. Her site launched this week to coincide with the release of her book, which has been getting rave reviews (her book, not the site). Her accolades are well deserved. Regina was a two time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for commentary and her newspaper column for the Cleveland Plain Dealer has won more journalism awards than I care to count. 

UPDATE: God Never Blinks made the New York Times bestseller list! 

Congratulations on the book, Regina, your youngest brother is proud of you.  

Like most designers, (and most professionals in general, I suppose), I have mixed feelings about social networking sites such as LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. At their best, they provide us the opportunity to network, reconnect with old friends, and potentially discover new clients. At their worst, we get to hear what someone we barely know is making for dinner or that an old girlfriend is still bitter about our breakup.

By and large, however, they fit the model of the old programming credo: Garbage in, garbage out. Whatever content populates the site governs our overall impression of the site. Hence, LinkedIn is perceived as professional and focused on client relations. Facebook, while occasionally juvenile, offers an informal way to stay on the radar of acquaintances who might otherwise be relegated to receiving the annual Christmas card. 

The latest foray into this increasingly crowded field is Unvarnished. The site allows users the opportunity to post peer reviews and comments about other professionals, anonymously. Since we all know how classy and upstanding most anonymous posters are to blogs, one can only speculate on the clever repartee that awaits us. The tagline on the site is “truth in reputation”. More accurately, it should be called “the bathroom wall of the internet”. 

The site in effect allows users to trash former co-workers, employers, all under the guise of providing a candid peer assessment. Critics have already called the site a litigation nightmare waiting to happen.

I’m not sure when we reached the tipping point of social networking, but this seems to be its nadir. 

I will let a more gifted writer than myself have the last word on this. Ralph Caplan, design critic and educator provides a curmudgeon’s take on social networking in his recent AIGA post. I had the pleasure of hearing Mr. Caplan speak at the first AIGA conference in Chicago in 1991.

I’m pleased to see his rapier has lost none of its point.