I saw this on The Register today: the Office of Government Commerce gets a new logo!

According to an inside source, the graphic had allegedly already been inscribed onto mousemats and pens in anticipation of its imminent deployment, but it took OGC foot soldiers around 20 seconds to realise (sic) why this particular bit of joss-stick-driven madness was going to end in tears (of laughter):

Here’s the new logo:

Before I turn it sideways, have a read at 25 reasons you Might Be a Hard Core Designer (I got 22 out of 25!):

1. You’ve had a client that thought they knew more about design than you.

2. Your clients pay you for your professional expertise and skill, yet you’ve run into one of ‘those’ clients, that refuses to take the advice from the very person he/she is paying for advice (you).

3. You’ve had a client that insisted on using the font “Papyrus,” and you had to hold in your barf as you prepped it [the design] for printing.

4. You’ve requested a vector logo from a client, and instead, they email you a 72 dpi image they grabbed from a website.

5. You’ve used typography as a texture.

6. You don’t have a favorite font because you love “Typography.” Not Fonts. Choosing a favorite font would be like choosing a favorite child, it’s just wrong.

7. You collect as many free stuffs from the interwebs as you can on your hard drive, hoping that one day, that cool project will come along that you can actually use some cool shit on.

8. You’d rather have a free font than a free gallon of gas.

9. It’s hard to talk about frustrations at your job with a group of friends because they have no idea what “Vector” or “DPI” is, just to name a couple.

10. You’ve had a client ask you to “Make the logo bigger.”

11.You’ve had a client that insists on “filling up the space.”

12. You’ve learned to over-price web design projects because most clients are more picky about their websites than a high school girl picking out a prom dress.

13. You feel like you’re “On Call” half of the time because clients procrastinate so much.

14. You know keyboard shortcuts that require 4 fingers.

15. You’ve lost hours of work because an application crashed, and you had to start over from scratch because you were in the “zone” and forgot to save. Basically, you were having so much fun being creative that saving was the last thing on your mind at the time.

16. You’ve “Live-Traced” something.

17. You spend more hours per week looking at CSS showcase sites than you do at the gym.

18. The only thing that would make you happier than the demise of IE6 is world peace.

19. You’ve done everything but give up a body part to talk a client out of a “Flash Intro.” Yeah. I said it. Flash Intro. Sad, so so sad. (goes along with #2)

20. You have enough fonts on your hard drive to last you for: 1 font per day for about a decade, give or take a year or two.

21. You know, explicitly, what a “Flourish” is.

22. You worry about negative space as much as the content area.

23. You get phone calls from friends and family members on a regular, sometimes annoyingly-frequent basis, wanting your services for free or extremely cheap. (and the “portfolio” line makes you want to throw something across the room)

24. You’ve had a client that wants a website they can “update” on their own, but doesn’t know shit about websites.

25. You’re never more than 99% happy with your final product because you believe that EVERYTHING can be improved upon. (especially with those tight-deadline projects)

And the logo sideways (clear your mind and think There’s Something About Mary). It’s easy to see how turning a mousepad would reveal this cock up: