What’s wrong with selling a needed service? What’s wrong with translating special skills into money? Nothing. {The arguments regarding brothels tend to focus on exploitation and degradation. Hiring new immigrants who we strongly suspect are here illegally to roof our homes, clean our grease traps, cut our lawns and for some, raise our kids, is- perhaps- more exploitive. We don’t seem to care about those people.} Why do designers get their panties in a bunch about the ethics of their work? What’s wrong with design? Nothing.

This sticker, designed by Peter Saville, was packaged as a freebee in a 2007 issue of Creative Review magazine out of the UK. (Saville is both a designer and fine artist. He did a great deal of work for Talking Heads in the 80’s.) The issue discussed some of the ethics of design work and was partially a response to Adrian Shaughnessy’s book How to Be a Graphic Designer and Without Losing Your Soul.

In tough times, such as the current global depression recession most of us have far more pressing issues than worry if taking on a particular project constitutes “selling out.” Selling out to what, exactly? It strikes that design is unique among professions in that it looks down on the commercial nature of it’s own work even as it exhalts in shameless self promotion. Design is business. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with business.