I’ve never been faced with a moral or ethical dilemma yet in my young career. Five years now, I’ve been designing, so it’s not a heck of a long time.

But a small piece of me dies when realize, well, everything is fake. Perfect example is stock photography. You find a model, place her in your ad, the caption reads “She discovered the difference.” Well she sure as heck didn’t! That ‘person’ may not know the company at all.

I wonder what else feels fake?

Do the models on television commercials that sell head and shoulders REALLY use that product? I bet the washed their hair with the product before they shot the commercial, if that.

How many times has a car manufacturer misrepresented the specifications of their car? The rear leg room is that big, sure…when the driver has his seat all the way up.

They’re not out right lies, in this world we belong to. They’re just deceitful little miss-truths.

But I sleep well at night because the companies I do work for are small mostly, local and genuine except for 2 or 3 that we have that are national (but still good companies. :)

My current place of employment balances the work we do for defense contractors and government telecommunications (hey, were in DC, there isn’t a lot of other for-profit businesses around here) with pro-bono work and non-profit work for development organizations, Goodwill and programs working for the release of prisoners of war. At least, at the end of the day, it helps us sleep at night. I think.

I suppose a bit of this goes to discerning things along the lines of Style=Fart or otherwise as well - I know I’ve at least dabbled in comps for some products that were intentionally going to be pitched with an artificial / fabricated history to them…I found it sort of a fascinating writing challenge and more than a little engrossing to think about whether the product would move better due to even a slight sense of it having been around longer than the week or so it had hit the shelves (it never made it beyond the drawing board, so I never had a chance to realize whether I felt totally guilty about it and the thing made a successful little niche for itself or to see it divebomb and think “Boy, did my design and concepting sink that ship?”).

In thinking about the Style=Fart or Style (does not equal) Fart discussion, I appreciated Sagmeister’s comment about someone in a smart suit pitching info to you and how much that suit may increase the effectiveness of the pitch - design can inevitably offer at least the veneer of many levels of authenticity, class, style, quality, etc., etc., etc.

I very much appreciate the sense that design can greatly enhance the reception of a message that may even in part be somewhat of a fiction - I guess I vaguely prefer that fiction to fall into a “white lie” area than an outright and damaging falsehood (I’d rather promote a beverage as being more flavorful and exciting than it might really be than promote a drink as benefitting health and wellness even while it sucks minerals out of your system and contributes to early heart failure…it’s simply a matter of finding out which is really true before you sign on to do the logo).

Especially now that I operate on my own, I’m pretty directly conscious of who and what I’m working with in terms of clients & projects - there were certainly times in my former work where I was a bit quesier about the validity / authenticity / ethics of a few projects…Late in my work before returning to grad. school and moving into teaching I felt especially compelled to “Just Say No” to a project I was especially bothered by - a fake gameboard which was going to be used in a commercial for a group of lawyers who handled a large number of divorce cases. The pitch was showing squares on the board of “Daddy’s Divorce” which all but completely stuck the blame on wives and seemed to really work at attracting embittered husbands to use this team’s services.

I’ll be equally honest in saying that I might not have felt enough leverage to say to my boss “I’m really not interested in working on this project” if not for the knowledge that I’d been accepted to grad. school and would be quitting within three weeks of starting the game project, but with that leighway and with a major feeling that I didn’t want to have to look back on my name being attached to that piece, I bowed out and worked on other in-house projects already in progress.

I’m a firm believer that great design comes out of a deep level of commitment and belief in the message / goals of a project, and would argue that even if someone is willing to set their own principles and convictions aside to work on a project, they’d need a high level of self-division to then appropriately empassion themselves to dig into an ethically-shady project.

I’m also a firm believer that research always pays off - I’ve read far too many horror stories about clients that seem pretty rosey and ethically sound on the surface, but are directly or indirectly contributing to any number of evils just below that veneer…With the extraordinary range of sources afforded through the Internet, there’s really no excuse for not knowing more than just the client’s / product’s version of the story.

I like JonSel’s approach to working around some of these concerns also - why not create something which will guarantee you’ll lose the job when you’re not interested in taking it? I guess I’d also extend the ethics and conviction of that situation to simply say outright to a current or potential client that “I’m not willing to promote your cause / product - I’m frankly against it and won’t work for you.”

I’m reminded of a fave quote from “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” (I believe it may only be in the newest film script vs. also in the book) - When Charlie begins contemplating trading his golden ticket for a generous sum of money which would easily help his impoverished family members, one of his grandfathers tells him, “Only a moron would trade something as rare as what you have for something as common as money…Are you a moron, Charlie?”…

I think we’re best to keep our golden tickets in safe storage these days…