There has been a design related tempest in a pisspot on gaming websites recently, making fun of (and in some idiotic cases being outraged by) Capcom’s Okami Wii Cover artwork oopsie. This post by GayGamer sums it up:

Wow, I can’t believe I didn’t notice this when it happened. Recently, it was “discovered” that the Okami Wii cover art contains an… abnormality. Amaterasu is barking a translucent IGN watermark. Yep, that’s right, they stole their own artwork off IGN’s web page. I guess the cover art staff could not be bothered to actually use press packs from the original release of the game. (Read More)

As a designer, I am vicariously amused and mortified for Capcom’s agency or design staff. I can’t count the number of times I’ve been rushed to deadline and just grabbed a photo off the web as a placeholder– always with the intention of replacing it with licensed, royalty free, or otherwise appropriate and usable images in before the thing goes out the door to a client. In my case, it usually doesn’t matter much since the contexts are design specs, and either not a final product, or final but web-ui based so any photographic stuff or text will almost always be populated on the fly.

But, you never know what will happen to a document once it’s electronic and not solely in your control. Our team recently put together a tasty little deck that was only intended to help communicate what we were working on one-on-one, with other folks internally. So tasty, in fact, that it was passed up the chain until it became The Presentation used at a Very Public Event. There was a fun, last minute scramble to scrub our once-internal deck of unlicensed art and inside jokes.

In conclusion: Always throw FPO on everything, as a not so subtle reminder to yourself that your work isn’t finished. Make sure you have an alert editor on hand to double check everything before you ship it out the door. And finally, to everyone else: Lighten the hell up.