Below is a video the boys made to promote a recent performance. I find the video so amusing and that ambient background music so mesmerizing that I’ve watched it ten times. Listen to the Planet Booty record here.

I built a satirical website to promote the ‘Party Werewolf’ t-shirt (all profits benefit the World Wildlife Fund; read more about why in this blog post). The site is SaveTheWerewolves.com and it is an intentional violation of all that is sacred and holy in web and graphic design. My goal was to have fun, to create something ludicrous, to raise money for charity, to try my hand at ‘guerilla marketing,’ and to lovingly satirize both web design and environmentalism. I was inspired by an intentionally awful and hilarious website called ‘The Official Website of America.’ That site epitomizes all that is considered wrong, bad, and outdated in web design: animated GIFs (as a tiling background image, no less!), a shitty embedded music file, eye-searing graphics, logic-defying layout choices, et cetera. So bad, it’s good.

It’s good to be serious about the standards and practices of good design, but I find that the design community takes itself awfully seriously sometimes. Getting upset about bad fonts seems silly to me (there are websites devoted to complaining about Comic Sans and Copperplate). Why agonize when you can satirize? I think most designers got into this field to have fun while being creative, but it might serve us well if we practiced the ‘fun’ part more often. Granted, that can be easier said than done while you’re trying to make a living during difficult economic times, and that might be why we should remind one another from time to time.

Another source of inspiration for me was William Friedkin’s use of ‘subliminal’ imagery in his films The Exorcist and Cruising. One of the scariest elements in The Exorcist is an image of a demon face that appears for a fraction of a second during several scenes – it’s visible if you are viewing closely, but it will scare the fuck out of you even if you are not entirely sure of what you’ve seen. Brilliant. I have embedded brief flashes of various imagery (including Mr.Friedkin’s demons) in the animated GIFs on SaveTheWerewolves.com and there are many (rotten) ‘Easter eggs’ hidden around the site. You can start finding them by hovering your cursor over almost any text or image on the homepage.

I hope the site makes you laugh and I hope you’ll consider supporting the World Wildlife Fund and Magnetic State! People who own the shirt tell me that it makes a great conversation piece. Thanks!

Last year I heard a quote that really struck a chord with me. That quote was “To do well by doing good.” I don’t have the means to radically change the world at the moment, so I am starting small – with charitable t-shirt sales.

I have chosen to donate to the World Wildlife Fund because it is a charity with a great reputation working toward a number of great causes. Another reason is that WWF is committed to slowing the potentially devastating effects of climate change. This is an issue I am passionate about. According to their website, “Climate change has been a priority for WWF for over 20 years as climate disruption poses a fundamental threat to the vulnerable places, species and people WWF seeks to protect.”

The knowledge I’ve gained about climate change over the years has come from a variety of sources, but one source that left a lasting impression on me was a short documentary called The Possibility of Hope by director Alfonso Cuarón. The film can be seen here on Youtube or on the DVD special features of Cuarón’s film Children of Men. The Possibility of Hope consists primarily of leading philosophers and intellectuals weighing in on a variety of subjects pertaining to Earth’s future. To be blunt, the film’s vision of the possible effects of climate change on the future of human civilization is terrifying. However, I prefer to focus on the positive side: the hope.

“The magic is to turn a desperate situation into a new beginning,” says Slavo Zizek in The Possibility of Hope. Another person who has had inspiring things to say about the hope for counteracting climate change is Lord Digby Jones of Birmingham – a.k.a. the United Kingdom’s ‘Voice of Business’ – whom I had the pleasure of hearing speak recently. “The answer to this issue is science,” he said of climate change, before going on to remark that leading economies of the world like the U.S. and the U.K. got wealthy creating this problem during the last century, so we should lead on solving it. He has also said, “the next Bill Gates will be the deliverer of a highly technological solution to some of our climate change challenges.” We might be in for a very exciting century.

This is an issue that I will continue to write about and work towards in the future. Thanks for reading. I hope you’ll consider supporting Magnetic State and the World Wildlife Fund by purchasing a shirt. The werewolf has arrived just in time for Halloween, and people who own it love to tell me what a great conversation piece it is!