Potty Mouth Creative Part 2

Subscribers to Creative Review received their February wrapped in a brown paper bag with the coverline “Your Mother is a Whore”. A radical new direction in customer relations, Creative Review aims to gain readers through foul-mouthed abuse of them, it’s so insane it just might work…

Actually, the bag is part of Mother agency in London’s guest editorship of the issue, the cover of the magazine itself runs “Mother paid £15,000 to edit this edition” and the theme of the issue, writes editor Patrick Burgoyne, “is about the dilemmas we face everyday. The ethics or lack of them, that we set our moral compasses by. The personal choices. The trade offs we make in order both to carry on doing work that we love and to put a roof over our head.”

If you can get a copy it’s worth looking through, there’s some interesting ideas in there, plus you get a sticker by Peter Saville to stick on your office door.

It’s generated lots of comment and as the idea was perhaps partly inspired by Adrian Shaughnessy’s extraordinarily successful How to be a Graphic Designer and without losing your Soul, Shaughnessy himself writes a piece for the Design Observer which also generates some intense comment.

Oliviero Toscani used to say “there’s always a Pope somewhere”, by which he meant is that someone always pays the bills, whether you are Michelangelo or Michael Murphy workng in a design agency.

The ethics debate aside “Your Mother is a Whore” must win first prize for the unlikeliest coverline of 2007. Any other suggestions? And what would you sell your soul for? I already sold mine in second grade for a Batman Pez Dispenser.

designethics