Nine years ago during the big dotcom boom and around the same time I was putting up the original futurejunkie site, I kidded around with a friend and co-worker about hickeys on websites. For those not in the design and printing industry, a “hickey” occurs when a piece of dust or other debris sticks to the printing plate while it is rotating in the press. This will result in a small knocked-out dot or smudge, about the size of a flea, on your image or color box or whatever it is you’re printing. Usually hickeys will work themselves out once the press gets up to speed, but it’s still something to watch out for. It happens; it’s unavoidable.

So we joked about seeing them on websites and I actually put one on futurejunkie 1.0. We had a good laugh. Har-har, graphic design humor.

But now I think I’ve actually found the hickey equivalent. It is on Barack Obama’s President-Elect site, that I referred to in the previous post. Go the site here and see. See that little blip above the change.gov seal and logotype, in between the H and the A in CHANGE? I initially though this was some yuk on my screen, but move the browser window around and it follows. A screenshot verified that it is in the image file. This is probably the result of a bad scan but someone needs to clean this up ASAP. I’ll update this post once it’s been noticed and corrected.