While perusing the day’s status updates on Facebook, I came across a video parody of not only one of my favorite singers, but of one of my favorite typefaces. You can imagine my excitement in finding that someone somehow had managed to creatively combine the two. It was posted by one of my Lady-Gaga-loving classmates from MassArt and is called, “Neutraface: An Ode On A Typeface (A Bearded Poker Face Parody).” It’s hilarious, and clever, and for some reason it makes me feel a little bit cooler to be a designer, like I’ve got the inside know-how to get this joke when most people would just shake their heads going, “What the heck is Neutraface?”

This got me thinking about the other videos parodying aspects of design that I’d seen recently, such as: “Auto-tuning: Blake needs to talk to Jack about the homepage... or at least he tries to” from Vimeo, and “Font Fight” and “Font Conference” from College Humor. Does this recent trend mean we designers have broken into mainstream-cool? Have we made it? Do they like us, do they REALLY like us?

I think now it’s time for the good people at Silverscape to start using our humor chops for good instead of evil; like instead of hilariously convincing me our WebManager design has been axed and requires an all-nighter of redesign, or an elaborate acceptance speech for the 2009 NEDMA awards is needed to be given by me (you know who you are), we could make a funny video of what it means to “Frankenstein”, or a montage of iStock searches gone horribly awry.

So, in the midst of our ecommerce website designs, HTML emails, and web design branding, I think this new year Silverscape is going to bring on the humor, one CSS and bad typography joke at a time.