Patrick Durgin-Bruce

Great work, y’all. 🙌

Matt Gaetz was the Hairy Arm of the Trump appointee slate.

The lesson being: if you have something that you want to get approved by a very critical audience, put in one obvious thing that they can call out for you to change. They feel like they had their input. And the rest of the project sails right through, just as you wanted it.

Taking it to the boss for review without realizing the error, the boss sternly instructed the designer to remove the hairy arm before printing. No other changes. For the first time ever, no layout changes.

As the story goes, late one night the designer mistakenly left an arm over the edge of the layout when shooting the photostat, resulting in the shadow of a hairy arm along the edge.

The story comes from the days of manually pasting up layouts, which were then photographed for reproduction. A designer had one such boss, who felt the need to put his imprint on everything, always giving changes to layouts.

Do you know the Hairy Arm Technique?

In the design biz, it’s an old tactic for dealing with an overly critical boss or client.

🧵

Such a great story.

What’s the story behind CSS purple?

Currently writing questions for a graphic design trivia night – what's your favorite bit of design trivia?