…and the number one reason why you should pay for stock photography: So you can get rid of that pesky watermark. Here’s a screenshot of a flash ad I spotted on allrecipes.com for the magic diet pill vendor curbyourcravings.com.

If you look really closely, you’ll see something other than a Hoodia patch plastered over this tummy:

Yep, it’s a watermark. And now that I know which stock phography site they stole the image from, it’s not hard to find the source image.

While Shutterstock operates on a membership fee rather than a pay-per-image model like iStockphoto, their prices are far from expensive when you compare them to traditional stock photography. I guess the moral to this story is pay for your stock images. Getting rid of the watermark isn’t the REAL number one reason to paying for good photos, but it will certainly keep you from looking like a cheapskate. If you don’t do enough design work to justify $199/mo for a membership to Shutterstock, then go to iStockphoto. If you can’t afford to pay $1/photo, check out stock.xchng, but don’t steal images.

Our shiny new Adobe Creative Suite 3 boxes arrived here at work yesterday and we while Micah was upgrading, something about the installer menu art immediately caught our attention. I’ll leave it up to you, dear reader, to let me know what you see in this image.

As far as I know, nobody has posted anything about this yet. So, just to be sure I wasn’t making a fool of myself, I asked a few random people what they saw in the image before posting this. Five of the eight people who I’ve asked so far immediately saw it. One person said “a crayon?”, but once I beat around the bush a bit, the universal response was basically “now I can’t NOT see it”. I guess what I’d really like to know is whether the designer knew what he/she was doing and how this got slipped in as the background image on the CS3 installer.

Still don’t get it? Click the image to see the original size.

Anybody out there that owns my book should know that I have a gratuitous fascination with monkeys. I didn’t think about this when I was writing it, but looking back now I realize that I used monkeys in the illustrations of 3 out of the 5 chapters of The Principles of Beautiful Web Design. Why do I admire monkeys so much? For the same reasons as anybody else I suppose:

• They are eager to help those in need.
• They have limitless literary potential.
• They know when to hold’em and when to fold’em.

Ok, so I’m not as hung up on primates as underworked statisticians or Kevin Cornell, but when I saw the fatwallet headline “Flying Screaming Slingshot Monkey $6.84 Shipped”, I was fumbling for my credit card before I even read the full product description. When my monkey arrived in the mail, I knew it was going to be the best office toy EVER. To give you an idea of just how the flying screaming screeching monkey works, I captured his first Cyberwoven office flight on video. Enjoy!

As the days grow longer and flowers begin to burst forth from the tawny winter landscape, I am reminded of one thing — it’s time to GET NAKED! As nonbelligerent as I am about validation and semantic markup, it makes me grin with mischievously nerdy glee when I think about CSS Naked Day. Dustin’s idea is genius, really. In case you have no idea what’s going on there, CSS Naked Day is basically a chance to show the world the power of stylesheets by simply removing them from our websites. To the general public, a good website design is nothing more than a cosmetic attribute. Appearances though, can be deceiving. Beneath the pretty layouts, colors, and type some websites are hacked together with their structure (HTML) hideously intertwined with presentation (CSS). By keeping these elements seperated, the web become much more printable, readable, flexible and ultimately more beautiful. It’s easy to tell if a website properly separates these two elements by simply turning off the presentation layer or CSS.

On April 5th, 2007 hundreds of websites will “go naked” by turning off their stylesheets, showing the world their pale-white, Times New Roman scribbled <body>s. I’ll be stripping down this website, as well as the website for my book, and amesnjas.com as well. Oh the humanity!