For the Jewish New Year, I’ve decided to post an ecard I made. Pass it on to friends and family! Yea, it’s recycled from last year…

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A good industrial designer friend of mine (good designer, good friend) once told me that design is a moral obligation. I believe that’s a very accurate way to describe the feelings us designers have. You know those feelings. The feelings you get when you see poorly-set type on the side of a van or on a storefront sign. You have those feelings when a non-profit asks you to make a website for them and they give you terrible logos and materials to work with. You get the feeling when you see anything at all that just isn’t quite made right; it’s poorly put together, the color is off, the pattern is ugly, it’s not anti-aliased, it has lens-flare, it’s loaded with drop shadows, bevels and every other Photoshop effect the creator has just discovered. The transparent gif has a halo; there are way too many animated gifs on the page. High rez photos were resized in HTML rather than being properly compressed. You know the feeling. It’s a tug, deep within; it’s everything a designer can do to keep from yelling out: STOP USING COMIC SANS!!!

As designers, we have to fix things. We can’t stand to watch poor design execution. It’s something we can’t control. We have no choice - it’s just completely inappropriate to live in a world where people can just ALLOW that horrible design to exist! It’s just not right!

What’s with us? Why does it bother us so much? Why must every design be perfect? Why can’t we allow people to use disposable cameras? Why must everything look pristinely crafted? Why not just let sleeping dogs lie?

The answer is, it’s our duty. That’s why we became designers. We know the industry is competitive. We know there are jobs that pay better and have better hours. But we don’t care. We were born to be designers. We have to design! It’s our job; our purpose! Being a designer is not an occupation; it’s a life-long pursuit! That’s why all the charity and pro bono cases pile up on our desks; that’s why we break design budgets. It has to be perfect! Nobody gets sub-par design!

Irony of ironies that we’re never satisfied with our work, either.

But that’s another article.

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Cuil (pronounced “Cool”) just launched today with a lot of rave reviews. The new search engine was started by some ex-Google folk trying to take on the internet search giant. They have a long road ahead of them.

At first, I was very impressed with Cuil. I really loved the layout, and the color. The contrast and grid design really aided the search process and made scanning for information easy.

Then I decided to search for stuff I knew about: Me. I looked up my name, which is not a common name in the least. Google returns lots of relevant results, with my own website listed first, including a Wired letter to the editor from some years ago.

Cuil? Meh. My website was listed second, and on the very first page there were 4 results that had no mention of my name, or anything similar to it! They even had a page which was on my old site - it’s been offline for months now! Also, the image in my website’s listing was completely unrelated to me or my website. I have no clue where they got it from! Very bizarre. Lucky it wasn’t something offensive!! I do wonder how they decide which image was to be the lucky image.

News? Calculator? Local results? Conversions? Definitions? These are a few of the amazing features of Google which make it so useful, and they are not present in Cuil. While I really did dig the layout, they have a long way to go before it will actually work as a proper search engine, let alone replace Google.

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