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This one is a little late to the table, but if you somehow missed both the original airing and the news aggregators out there that picked it up, it may yet be news to you.

A few weeks ago, the Republican party released an advertisement promoting their new slogan “the change you deserve”.

Roll the clip:

The logo test would have been instructive but we should also add to that, as commenter Mark Goren suggests, the Google test. A good brand shouldn’t work just as well alongside your competitor’s logo, nor should it link to anything embarrassing or otherwise counter-message online (like a powerful prescription antidepressant).

It’s one thing for taglines to be interchangeable, quite another when they set up an unfortunate and humorous juxtaposition that ends up on “the funny news”.

You get…nothing! Absolutely nothing!

As I mulled over the clip, I realized “the change you deserve” is a dreadful —if not asinine— tagline. It’s the branding equivalent of Fruit Stripe gum. It starts off nice and sweet, sounding pretty good the first time you hear it, but then the more you think about it, the meaning becomes less and less clear until it’s just pure marketing schlock in your ears.

Slogan: You deserve change.
Audience: Surely I do. But change to what exactly?
Slogan: Uh, the change you deserve.
Audience: And that is…?
Slogan: Not the change those other guys are talking about. Different change. You deserve our change.
Audience: From what I can tell, you’re not really offering much change.
Slogan: Exactly, that’s the change you deserve. (*rimshot*)

In a market (ha!) saturated with "zing! pow! zoom!-esque" design, London-based R Design and IDEO founder Naoto Fukasawa show us the path to cut through the noise, and create powerful, harmonious packaging design with less.

We’ll let London-based R-Design speak for their design for Selfridges & Co. products: "…this colour coding of black shines on shelves that traditionally blind us with lurid rainbows. One color. One typeface. One point size. Packaging good enough to eat."

Couldn’t have said it better myself.

Taking design restraint one step further, the inimitable Naoto Fukasawa never ceases to amaze with this lovely package for banana juice. It is hard to extol this design enough: Fukasawa uses a communicative surface to actually remove the need for any type or graphics whatsoever. Nirvana.

Thanks to our friends at The Dieline Package Design Blog for the heads-up.

Ever since I first read Vista’s UAC security prompt was designed to annoy you at Ars Technica, I’ve had a chip on my shoulder about it.

User Account Control is easily one of the most hated features of Windows Vista, according to readers. The seemingly endless stream of UAC pop-ups, asking you to confirm this action or that action, just get in the way (and aren’t particularly zippy, given the screen redraw)…

At the RSA 2008 confab in San Francisco, Microsoft admitted that UAC was designed, in fact, to annoy. Microsoft’s David Cross came out and said so: “The reason we put UAC into the platform was to annoy users. I’m serious,” said Cross.

Microsoft’s idea here is that they can transfer the burden of not annoying users to developers. This seems almost reasonable when you say it like that, but the reality is this: In order for users to not be constantly frustrated by these pop-ups, developers are forced to jump through hoops to design their software in such a way that privilege elevations aren’t needed in the first place. (UAC is basically a lumbering, graphical sudo.)

This means that Microsoft’s best attempt to solve the problem of viruses and malware infection for Vista ensures that a) no extant software is cleanly compatible with installation, b) every software company designing for Windows now has to refactor their installers, and c) also, everyone else has to be creative enough to figure out how to do everything they need to do without requiring elevated permissions (good luck, Norton!).

So, the burden of solving the problem of malware and viruses on Windows now lies entirely with outside developers. Not only does this not seem exactly fair, it’s not even expected to work! More from the above article:

One could argue that this approach is incredibly flawed, since the people best in position to make the changes needed are developers, not the end users who are stuck with a cavalcade of UAC prompts.

My grandma, humiliated by the TSA.

I would argue that not only is this approach incredibly flawed, it is downright irresponsible, totally uncreative, and borderline sadistic. It reminds me of the way I am constantly humiliated at the airport ("You can only have 2.5 ounces of shampoo!", "Take off your shoes and belt!", and other experiences that people used to have to pay for in New York S&M Clubs).

Now I am going to offer you platitudes by famous self-improvement guru Dale Carnegie’s most famous and popular book.

The three fundamental tenets of How to Win Friends and Influence People are:

1. Make the other person feel important.
2. Frame requests in terms of what others find motivating.
3. Positive Reinforcement works better.

Microsoft UAC: Zero for three.

Here, the United States government subtly reinforces the fact that if they want to X-ray your shoes, they will.

Here, Microsoft subtly reminds you that whatever goes wrong with Windows is your fault for approving this message.

I wrote a post a while back about a conundrum I faced—which side of a can of Red Bull should display the label: the side facing the customer or the drinker? On one hand, I argued, people want others to notice what they are drinking, so it is important for the logo to face outwards.

Earlier this week, a reader commented that the logo wasn’t that important – the unique, narrow shape of the can was how people would recognize the brand. I thought this was a good point, and it reminded me of something I’d read frequently in interviews with Matt Groening about the importance of profiles or silhouettes in design:

The secret of designing cartoon characters — and I’m giving away this secret now to all of you out there — is: you make a character that you can tell who it is in silhouette. I learned this from watching Mickey Mouse as a kid. You can tell Mickey Mouse from a mile away…those two big ears. Same thing with Popeye, same thing with Batman. And so, if you look at the Simpsons, they’re all identifiable in silhouette. Bart with the picket fence hair, Marge with the beehive, and Homer with the two little hairs, and all the rest. So…I think about hair quite a lot.

Of course, everything has a shape, but I think it is common to overlook the effectiveness of profile. Too often, I think, we focus on the content rather than the container and profile simply is simply what emerges. What Groening is saying, I believe, is not necessarily to do the opposite, but that a strong design works even when it is reduced to a mere outline.

It’s something to think about the next time you’re designing something that needs to stand out and be recognizable, like a brand or even a collection of icons for an interface. Take a step back and look at the artifact in silhouette. Now how does it read? Does it distinguish itself?

As for the Red Bull… well, these days it’s not the only tall narrow can on the shelf. It’s disappointing because it’s no longer distinguishing in the same way. However, it speaks to how iconic the design has become—the Red Bull design is the energy drink can.

Your moment of Zen for the day:

Shapes are important.
But shape isn’t everything.
More Tao of design.

I spent a good part of this morning watching John Berger’s 1972 television series Ways of Seeing (nod to Click Opera).

Ways of Seeing follows from a line of thought set forth in Walter Benjamin’s canonical 1936 essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Summarily, with the advent of art’s mechanical reproducibility, and the development of forms of art (such as film) in which there is no original, the experience of art is freed from place and ritual and instead brought under the gaze and control of a mass audience, leading to a shattering of the object d’art’s "aura" - its ability to produce awe and reverence in a viewer.

You must hurry to see this incredible show at YouTube while it is still available.

Here is a quote from Episode One of Ways of Seeing:

A large part of seeing depends upon habit and tradition.

As you look at [the paintings] now, on your screen, your wallpaper is around them. Your window is opposite them. Your carpet is below them. At this same moment, they are on many other screens, surrounded by different objects, different colors, different sounds. You are seeing them in the context
of your own life.

Once, all these paintings belonged to their own place…everything around (them) confirm(ed) and consolidate(d) (their) meaning.

I have questions, complicated questions. These include, "do awe and reverence actually somehow stem from uniqueness or originality?" and, "if ‘authenticity’ and even the existence of an original are off the table, does the kind of ritual that might produce an ‘aura’ reassert itself in some other way?" and, "can meaning be consolidated, or is that just a modernist myth?"

But, my friends, those are questions for another context. Here, let’s keep it simple, and talk briefly about what it means to design experiences that are, by definition, nomadic. I mean nomadic in the sense that they have no defined "place" that provides an experiential context - qua Berger, qua Benjamin. They will be surrounded by a potentially infinite number of windows and wallpaper (on-screen and off), carpets, pictures, in some cases they will be subject to the erratic whims of browser rendering engines, and always to the slightly-less-erratic whims of display drivers.

This means that your design will need to be created as part of an incredibly deep and disparate matrix of experience.

Which is yet another chance to impart one of our favorite lessons here at DLB: Keep it simple. Let’s look at the example of two incredibly popular and well-branded websites. Here’s netflix.com against two arbitrary desktop colors:

Note that Netflix’s famous red becomes almost bile-inducing in the context of the desktop on the right. Now, let’s take a look at Google:

The infamously simple Google front page stands up much better to our ugly, ugly desktop. Not only that, it worked with every color I tried. Why? Because white matches everything. And so does black.

Now the really incredible part. Google’s logo has reds in it that are almost exactly the same reds used on the Netflix site. And, because they are provided in page context which sufficiently couches them from the "great outdoors," and in reasonable quantities, they actually manage to work with the green color.

This is important, because I am not here espousing that you pitch black-and-white sites to your clients. I am espousing some restraint, and mindfulness of the wide variety of contexts in which your work will be presented. Q.E.D.

Noah Brier’s BrandTags has been something of a runaway success. Since May 9, almost everyone, from Seth Godin to Jason Kottke, has written something about it.

BrandTags is "a collective experiment in brand perception. All tags are generated by people like you…" It is basically a way to gauge public perception of brands, which is a pretty neat idea, and provides some really interesting information (proving once again the incredible power of tagging) about the public perception of brands.

Very often I have found that the word I type for these brands is quite popular. This means that branding works. Advertising dollars combined with the excruciating minutia of shaping the curves of p’s and d’s do in fact align to create a "brand image" (positive and negative, of course) that penetrates our culture to a degree that probably justifies the arrogance of the professional creative-types who do these things. For example, Harley Davidson is associated with things like freedom and leather. Miller Lite is understood to be cheap. Somehow, despite all evidence to the contrary, Coca-Cola regularly gets tagged as refreshing.

Now here’s the part that I found interesting. Take look at the tags for Google. Notice anything? Here’s what I noticed. What seems to be far and away the most popular tag for the Google brand (followed shortly by awesome, evil, search and internet) is Google!

Now I know we are all used to the fact that Google dominates the universe, and we are even more or less prepared for them to destroy it, but for some reason I wasn’t quite prepared for the fact that Google had achieved corporate identity nirvana: apparently they’ve passed through the “associative” identities reserved for mere mortal companies and achieved logical identity: Google = Google.

He’ll sting you with his dreams of power and wealth! Beware of Scorpio!
His twisted twin obsessions are his plot to rule the world and his employees’ health!

Reading Paul’s post from Wednesday, I was reminded how much work is performed by the word “design” and how many domains it crosses over. Poynor stakes a claim for greater emphasis on the visual in design, but as Paul wisely points out, a lopsided account of the discipline is unproductive.

Certainly, the way something looks is important, but this isn’t the only criteria for a design. John Maeda writes:

[I]n Japanese there is the word sekkei, which connotes designing a mechanism, system, or technology with rationalized metrics for quality. Dezain, on the other hand, goes beyond an object’s function to how it makes us feel.

This seems to be the right idea. However, such a definition places no limitations on how sekkei or dezain are accomplished or in what proportion. Something that works well can make us feel good; it doesn’t necessarily have to look good. Similarly, as Donald Norman points out, something that looks good can make us think it works well. Both might be considered good designs by their users.

The lesson here is that even as we try to isolate what a good design needs, design can never be so formulaic. Experience tells us that sometimes, when everything is accounted for, it still doesn’t add up.

The truth is, it’s not all that useful to separate the different aspects of a design. Design is everything taken into consideration. As Bryan Lawson writes:

“A piece of good design is rather like a hologram; the whole picture is in each fragment. It is often not possible [to determine] which bit of the problem is solved by which bit of the solution.”

Whether it is an object, a process, or the field itself, design can’t be fragmented so easily. To understand it all, we need both thinking and making; structure and surface. When we read articles like Poynor’s, we should recognize them for what they are:

Anyone who tries to draw battle lines around what is and is not design isn’t promoting design. They’re promoting an institutional view of design.

I don’t think it’s constructive to try and isolate one implementation from another. Whatever form it takes, design should be rigorous, not shallow. We can all agree on that one.

Rick Poynor, writing for ID last month, made an impassioned defense of the much-maligned visual element of the design process, an element he sees as one that designers should be willing to defend to its many critics, paramount among whom are the "design thinkers" who seek to supplant visual designers with vision-hungry corporations worldwide.

Quoting Dori Tunstall, he argues :

"There is an inherent intelligence to beauty, which is about the depth and passion we feel for the world." Design thinkers like to wax lyrical about the elegance of their strategic thinking as a form of design in its own right, as though this could ever be a substitute.

While my tendency, coming as I do from an interface design background, is to recoil at the very idea that making things look nice is somehow "good enough", Poyner does have a point, and some downright alarming quotes to back it up. Including Adaptive Path President Peter Merholz quoted as saying, “Designers like the shiny-shiny…That’s often why they got into design.” Poyner volleys:

Is an encounter with an everyday brand — a bottle of soda, a power tool, a packet of snacks — the place to go if you want to be moved, to seek education, or to grow as a person, and aren’t there better places to find those kinds of experiences?

The bad news is that both Merholz and Poyner are right. Essentially, the shiny-shiny isn’t good enough, and also all the corporate vision in the world isn’t going to help Miller Lite stir my emotions. The good news is that both of them (or at least their respective sound-bytes) are fighting straw men, the silliest representatives of design culture, visual or otherwise.

I suppose, though, that one does have to say those things, because often enough the silliest elements of culture are so often highly successful.

We don’t want the most salient representatives of our profession to be associated with, on the one hand, mindless Photoshop junkies casting drop-shadows and ripple effects on the once-powerful identities of their clients, or, on the other hand, academic blowhards, spouting rhetoric intended to, “dazzle prospective clients into believing that they are dealing with rigorous professionals who work with precise methodologies and defined, quantifiable outcomes.”

The problem, then, as I see it, is not so much the concrete philosophico-strategic position of one camp or the other (insofar as they ever exist atomically), but the general mindlessness that allows any design firm to internally justify that either a mindless visual kludge or else the Emperor’s New Clothes is a legitimate result for a consulting engagement.