29. VIVA DOLAN COMMUNICATIONS & DESIGN
Firstlight, offering rights-managed and royalty-free stock images to clients around the world, wanted to redesign its bimonthly magazine Zoom. “I’m trying to appeal to graphic designers, so naturally I turned my attention to meat and smut,” says designer Todd Temporale.

“We put ‘meaty smut’ into Firstlight’s incredible search engine and from there the brochure pretty much designed itself.”

The idea was to show designers that Firstlight has interesting images as well as the typical stock photographs. Of course, they had to convince senior management at Firstlight that the graphic designers they sought to reach have a keen appreciation for meat and smut. Apparently, they succeeded. Temporale says he thinks the spread with the large raw steak juxtaposed with the boy playing the accordion while his mother milks a cow is a good representative of what Firstlight is all about.

After being certain that the brochure had arrived in studios across North America, Viva Dolan commissioned a scientific poll. Results showed that 98 percent of designers like smut and 78.3 percent like meat—72 percent said they liked both. “Oddly,” Temporale says, “the 2 percent that said they liked neither smut nor meat all live in blue states.” Romy Ashby