free variable

Below is the lower part of a poster-sized advertisement in a local parking garage. Similar advertisements are on billboards, etc., throughout Madison.

I suspect it is impossible for others, as it is for me, to read the URL without immediately locking on to “infertility.com,” which is probably not what these folks want unless there are some Secret Branding Techniques that cover such subtle reverse psychology. (It could be worse.)

I’ve been meaning to post about the Pepsi re-brand since I saw it on Brand New. I’m no marketing expert, but this looks terrible and generic to me.

Look at the logo marks for the three Pepsi drinks, which are different, but probably not different enough to be readily distinguishable outside of context. (Is Diet Pepsi supposed to be “thin,” or “strained and horrible?”) One certainly couldn’t argue that these are iconic — instead, they have the feel of that ubiquitous “gently upturned arch” logo element of the mid-90s, which was tired even before it was part of absolutely every corporate logo everywhere. (Hey, some people are still using that one. Retro!)

Speaking of “retro,” let’s consider that cloying, noxious typeface. Instead of getting “hip” or “timeless,” this font looks like an amateurish, postmodern riff on art deco faces (or perhaps ITC Avant Garde, depending on the extent of the riffing) to my eye. Several decades ago, there were a lot of all-lowercase wordmarks that looked sort of like this if you don’t really pay attention. This face features some similar proportions to those used in the older marks, but has enough bizarre tweaks to avoid the “dated but classic” look. Instead, it merely appears dated.

True story: one of my favorite kid-friendly restaurants in Madison has good-to-excellent food and typically offers great value, but the presentation is often a little off and the staff sometimes seem flaky. I once became convinced that the soda fountain was contaminated with cleaning fluid, because the Diet Pepsi I had ordered on several consecutive meals featured an overwhelming “industrial solvent” flavor. I was pretty worried about this until an understocked vending machine gave me occasion to drink a bottled Diet Pepsi. As it turns out, Diet Pepsi from the bottle sort of tastes like cleaning fluid, too.

Graphic Design Goes to the Games: a very nice overview of Olympic branding from Khoi Vinh; scroll down to see some beautiful Swiss-influenced materials from the 1972 Munich Games.

According to Gina Trapani, writing for Lifehacker, Ubuntu honcho Mark Shuttleworth is interested in improving the Linux desktop experience:

Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth (who we interviewed last year) announced that he’s out to make Linux a better-looking operating system than Mac OS X—within two years.

Trapani then asks whether or not a “better-looking” Linux would motivate switchers:

Everyone loves eye candy on their desktop — Apple’s record-setting Mac sales can attest to that — but is looks is the main hurdle for Linux adoption amongst Normals?

This is notable, since it exemplifies a pervasive way to completely miss the point. People don’t use Apple’s computers because they’re pretty or feature “eye candy.” People use Apple’s computers because they work well. Design is not about how something looks; design is about how something works.

Read the rest of this entry »

We have been quite happy with our most recent car, a Pontiac Vibe (aka “Toyota Matrix”). It gets reasonable mileage; comfortably seats two adults, a dog, and a toddler (along with all of the attendant stuff); and has been painless to maintain. One of the best things about the Vibe, though, is that it is a remarkably well-designed car. Here I refer not only to the main user interface—which places necessary functionality within reach of the driver, labeled unambiguously—but also to the layout of the car’s interior.

The only design complaint I have with the Vibe relates to the headlights, which turn on automatically at dusk. (They can also be turned on manually.) This seems to me to be a worse design choice than either obvious alternative: namely, all-manual headlamp adjustment or always-on headlamps (perhaps with a “manual off” option).¹ I think this is the case because it tries to be too clever and fails.

The situations that demand headlamp use are fairly common, including darkness, overcast weather, and precipitation. By contrast, situations that contraindicate headlamp use are rarer: very dense fog comes to mind, but I can’t think of many others.² In a car with always-on headlamps, one only has to worry about the rare case: how to disable the headlamps when their use makes the situation worse. In a car with fully-manual headlamps, one only has to worry about the common case. (In practice, I’ve found quickly develop a reflex to turn the lamps on and off with ignition when regularly operating such a vehicle, like our older car.³)

In a car with dusk-activated headlamps, one has to worry about both cases. The low-light sensor doesn’t trigger in most rain or snow (and the lamps don’t turn on with the windshield wipers, which might also be sensible), so the headlamps are effectively manual in this case. (This also holds more generally; conditions outside might well be dim enough so that one would prefer headlamps, but not dim enough to activate the automatic lamps.) Because the times when manual intervention is necessary crop up arbitrarily, what should be a reflex instead becomes an attention-demanding, multi-step process.

Worse still, it isn’t possible to turn off the Vibe’s headlamps if the car believes that they should be on. Instead of providing an intuitive, manual solution that inspires habit and reflex or an automatic solution that requires zero effort at all in the overwhelmingly common case, the Vibe headlamp design assumes that it knows better than you do when the headlamps should be on and offers no provision for overriding its advice. At least it isn’t also controlling my pod bay doors. By being too clever, this design is actually more user-hostile than two substantially “dumber” alternatives.

Of course, the don’t be too clever principle isn’t merely confined to automatic headlamps. Countless designs fail spectacularly because the designer has incorrectly assumed that there is only one reasonable way to expect the product to behave or to interact with it. (Note that correctly assuming that there is only one reasonable way to interact with something is one of the hallmarks of excellent design — and perhaps the hardest to get right!) At least in the case of the Vibe, I can put a small card over the light sensor (which is on the dash) and get my always-on headlamps. There’s no such luck when some web application capriciously disables my “Back” button.

POSTSCRIPT: Apparently, the 2008 Vibe features always-on headlamps. I guess you can’t please everyone, since the internets are full of people complaining about this feature and asking how to disable it.

¹ I’m not alone in this concern; it seems that many people are interested in disabling the automatic lamp functionality.

² Perhaps some situations that might arise in the commission of practical jokes, espionage, or crimes—in which stealthy vehicle operation is at a premium—count, but I imagine that these aren’t on the radar in the design meeting.

³ I discovered that I’d lost this reflex—unfortunately, only the “turn the lamp off” part—when going back to the older car after a few months with the Vibe. Thank goodness for AAA.