It is kind of sad when a college tries too hard and fails at being cool. Most often this happens in design, where some designer (who really, let’s be honest, couldn’t cut it in the real world) brings their mediocre attempts at “youth marketing” to the table. Most often you wind up with a complete piece of crap, and if you’ve read some other posts here you’ll note that I think this has a large detrimental impact on recruiting. I think, despite the crapiness of MySpace and other popular sites, young people equate bad design with a bad product/college.

Let’s take a peek at Spring Arbor University’s Undergraduate Admissions site. Holy lord (pun intended). I can hear it now:

“Hear me out here. Kids LOVE really busy, mostly unreadable, splatty (just coined that), jagged stuff. I mean, look around! I think we should hand letter the options with a mouse, to get that extra crappy look.”

The sad thing about the lettering in particular is that it looks like a font. And a red rollover with gaussian blur? Doh. Jump in and check out more of the same, but now with paper and tape! This is probably a good time to point out that I’ve done this before, but in a tasteful way. Check out Eckerd Campus Activities. I think the difference between my design and theirs is pretty clear, they decided to take the “throw it all in there” approach as opposed to being a bit more selective.

I’d love to see some research comparing young folks’ opinions of design with the quality of the product, I have to think this doesn’t play out well for places like Spring Arbor. It is sort of silly too, because their main template isn’t half bad.

The good news is that if you’re interested in Spring Arbor the design is the least of your concerns:

“Spring Arbor University, a small Christian college in Michigan, is firing Julie Nemecek (formerly known as Dr. John Nemecek) because they feel her transgender transformation is not a good model of Christian character for their students.”

Read some more about God’s thoughts on John… er, Julie’s life choices. BoingBoing pointed out that there is a student-run Facebook group in support of the professor, which is pretty cool.