Are they the best in Europe?
Another bile-raising item comes through on my copywriting feed today: the 2007 Grand Prix Competition held by the Federation of European Business Communications Associations (FEIEA – although I’m sure it should be FEBCA, perhaps the acronym’s based on the French or indeed Esperanto). There’s something odd about that page: can you guess what it is yet? Yes, you’re right – it stretches beyond the edge of the screen if you’re running at below 1280 pixels width. And even then, it seems to go slightly beyond the edge. Silly FEBCA. Don’t they realise that good web design is also communication? They clearly have the same problem as some members of the CiB.
I would go on to remark that their ‘About us’ page is thoroughly uninspiring with its ‘proud 50 year record of connecting communicators across Europe’ (there’s a hyphen missing in that sentence too), and its ‘ serving as the expression of cross-border co-operation to improve the effectiveness and the standing of corporate communicators.’ Yawn. Or that it uses Adobe PDFs all over the place for reports and forms. But I won’t. I’ll just let the pictures speak for themselves…
Why do people who ‘facilitate communication’ have to portray themselves in such a dull, uninteresting way? Why don’t they take into account form as well as function? Perhaps that’s the difference between copywriters and ‘communicators’. We actually have to get people interested, to sell an idea, a product, a service, whereas they just ‘communicate’.
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