Now that the web has been around for well over a decade, most professional sites, personal sites or blogs, and in general sites with any credibility at all have a ubiquitously polished look.  But lately, possibly emerging out of the low-fi, user-generated-content aesthetic, is a trend in seeking reverse-credibility through deliberately, earnestly bad design. Take as evidence the site Ogilvy Canada designed

Fake blogs and fake personal sites are now a well-worn trick in marketing attempts (Coke, for example?) but the striking thing about the design of beeboy.org is just how far it goes to make it look like it was done by a design-impaired bee scientist, rather than an ad agency. The site has no visually apparent relationship to HoneyComb cereal, though the background has a primitive honey comb-like pattern in a washed-out science-y blue. The site itself plays it completely straight as far as presentation, leaving the comedy to the videos of “Bernard, the Bee Boy” interacting with modern society. Only one video out of six actually features HoneyComb cereal, but it shows only a single piece of the cereal as Bernard “shares his favourite human food.” It contains no logo or branding of HoneyComb cereal other than the recognizable honeycomb shape of the product itself.

But the realism is compromised by the fact that there are so many web templates and publishing aids available now that it is actually very difficult to create a site like this one unless you can make HTML code by hand. As Steve Hall of Adrants points out, this approach screams "This was done by an ad agency trying to make it look like it wasn't!" On the other hand, the site does speak to the rather timeless (mis)perception of scientists as having no interest in visual design, a stereotype that has not necessarily caught up with Web 2.0 standards. Perhaps Ogilvy felt that the humor in that stereotype would trump viewer's recognition of this as an artfully achieved faux-naive effect. What do you think-- would you have sniffed out this site as an advertiser's creation?