huhcorp.com: They Do Stuff

Wickedly funny design consultanacy site satire cuts close to the bone The home page of the greatest design consultancy there ever was The site design is clean and understated; the faces on the pictures are young and fabulous. (…)

Wickedly funny design consultanacy site satire cuts close to the bone

The home page of the greatest design consultancy there ever was

The site design is clean and understated; the faces on the pictures are young and fabulous. You read the following copy:

Our designers ride Razor scooters around the office, while wearing mail-bag style backpacks to hold their iPods.

We have lots of shiny espresso machines, and all of our new-age e-movers (that’s our cool way to say “consultants,” remember?) drive to work in VW Beetles.

Dang, you think, how can I find a job here? Then you read down to:

If you call our office, the phone will be answered by a very disinterested intern, giving you the impression that we’re too important to talk to you. Because we are.

Huh? you think.

Exactly.

One issue central to every designer’s activity is style with respect to substance. Huh? Corp.’s website is beautfully done, pleasant to look at, and looks like a site designed to impress potential customers and hopeful employees. As a read of the copy will soon reveal, however, it is a wickedly funny fiction.

We won’t excerpt any more of the textâ€“that would give too much away. Reading the site it quickly becomes clear that the author takes well-aimed, knowing, and biting swipes at many of the conceits inherent in consultancy. Well-done satire holds a warped mirror up to its subject to reveal hilarious, cautionary truths, and huhcorp.com succeeds in that regard.

The site has fairly taken the online creative community by storm, with creator Greg Smith (CD at Building Online in Dana Point, CA) getting coverage of it and himself in the Sep/Oct 2005 issue of STEP inside design magazine. In the regular “5w’s” feature, Emily Potts quotes him as saying:
.

..one of the things that always struck me as both funny and ridiculous was the plethora of high-gloss, no-substance, e-something companies out there. They looked good, but just didn’t seem to do anything. So many times I’d look through thses sites, professionally designed with all the bells and whistles, and simply be left saying “huh?”

And, thus, a website was insipired. Appropriately-themed real Google AdSense ads bring an ironic reinforcement to the site’s look and feel.

Perhaps most ironically, this site that points the finger of satire at the style-instead-of-substance direction that design can sometimes take has become his most well known calling card and, as Smith further said in STEP Magazine, “it’s become my best marketing tool, and the best portfolio piece I could ever show someone.”

In other words, it helps him get work doing the the very work he’s satirizing.

Connect to huhcorp.com here. Bookmark it. You know you want to.

25 October 2005