 I'm sure this story will not have happened to many people. About six months ago a friend bought me a set of Top Trumps for my birthday. Now growing up I loved Top Trumps and I hadn't played in years. To make it even better the Top Trumps in question were called Plop Trumps and they featured poo from different animals around the world. Fantastic I thought. I have a young son who would love to play this. So for the last six months I have been familiarising myself with various animal poo's. In fact one of the great things about this set is the in depth trivia that goes along with each poo. For example.... "The average giant panda eats as much as 14kg of bamboo shoots each day. This nutrient poor diet is so low in energy that giant pandas are not very active. They typically sit around munching bamboo and pooing up to 40 times a day" |  |
Now fast forward to a couple of weeks ago and I was asked to watch a friends' child whilst they popped to the shops. This child was a girl and my tool box of kids entainment is better suited to boys so as I was sat there with this small child expecting me to entertain them for half an hour I turned to the faithful Plop Trumps and we began playing. Then half way through the game, I was losing and had just lost my Snow Leopard poo card which is ranked highly for smelliness. This young girl turns to me and says something that struck a real chord with all my web design work I have ever done and ever will do. She said, 'The funny thing about this picture is I know it's poo and it's gross but it looks quite sweet as well.' This puzzled me for a second as I took on board the magnitude of that statement. What this small innocent child was saying was that despite the fact that she was looking at poo the poo looked good. I thought about the pictures differently from that point on. It was no longer about what the images represented in reality it was about how they made the person feel in the moment. Now if the photographer who shot the poo in question (a camel poo, i'm sure you were wondering) was trying to upgrade that image beyond it's physical reality they had achieved it. In a sense that poo had reached enlightenment. It had transcended its smelly physical form. Strangely like a star giving off old light at the point at which the enlightment had been achieved the poo was long since decomposed. (That's sounding quite philosophical now.) You get the idea though. The images we use in design need to make people feel and if you can get an image that is inherently gross to make someone feel differently about it, if that's your aim, then you are doing a good job. Thankfully I have never had to show a poo in a good light before but I will be using the poo test with all my image and design work in future. If this website was a poo would it be a good poo?
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