Marlboro is a sponsor of the Ferrari Formula One team, but European laws prohibit cigarette advertising -- so what to do?

This barcode-looking thing is an ingenious design. It's not explicitly the Marlboro brand, but at a subconscious level -- particularly at high speeds -- it gets the point across.

As of last month, the design was removed due to complaints. But it's still an interesting case of design ethics, this subliminal non-advertisement.

Images via J. Jason Smith, Graphicology

1. Facebook Now Accounts For 1 In 4 Internet Pageviews(?)

Database marketing firm Drake Direct claims that Facebook represents 1 in 4 pageviews in the US. By comparison, Google gets 1 in 12 pageviews using the same dataset.

The data sounds questionable, but it made me think. These days, I probably visit Facebook at least as much as Google. I wonder how that traffic breaks down in terms of Facebook applications vs. socializing? How much of those numbers are games, for instance?

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This first piece is Rob Price’s iconic Grandfather Clock, wherein a sectional – yet functional— slice evokes the whole grandfather clock.

The detail that really sells it for me is the plexi face (Right). While the rest of the clock is solid wood, the “cut” exposes the joinery through the glass.

In a similar vein (no pun intended), I found this Dexter-branded “dismembered flatware” on the same website. A different kind of reductionism, but evocative, to be sure. I appreciate the detail of Dexter’s signature hypodermic needle puncture on each piece.

I love Target commercials. I have never been able to figure out why exactly, but I find them utterly charming and classy.

I can tell you what I do know: They have great music and production values. Helvetica titles. Modelesque multicultural actors. You never see a price, store interior, or employee-- they emphasize brands: those of products, designers, and Target itself.

The formula seems simple and innocent enough, yet it forms a gestalt that my lizard brain finds irresistible. Suddenly I’m pushing around a red shopping cart full of limited edition designer sheets, a case of Gatorade, and a giant decorator wall clock.

I know what triggers this behavior, so I am careful to watch for the signs. Hence, I was quick to notice when the latest Target commercial seemed to mark a change in tactics.

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If you're keeping up with the design-blogosphere, you've probably already seen that the British Royal Mint recently revealed their new coinage.

If not, then you have now.

The young gentleman responsible for these designs (which were chosen from a public contest) is Matthew Dent, who says this:

I found the idea that members of the public could interact with the coins the most exciting aspect of this concept. It's easy to imagine the coins pushed around a school classroom table or fumbled around with on a bar - being pieced together as a jigsaw and just having fun with them.

I've always thought that being charged to design currency would be an interesting design project. It certainly seems as if it would be incredibly high-stakes: as if literally everyone would have an opinion, as if this moment of design would really count. But would it?

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In the late 1870s, scientist and eugenicist Sir Francis Galton developed an image of the prototypical "face of crime" by creating composite photos of men convicted of serious offenses.

Though Galton failed to discover anything abnormal in his composite criminal faces, he did find that the resulting visages were shockingly handsome. (The middle face here is the product of 14 criminals.) Studies have since established that people find prototypical faces—those with average features—to be attractive.

– Maggie Wittlin, Seed Magazine

An attractive 'average' face generated by the Face Research Lab

Back in September, 2006, a paper published in the journal Psychological Science proposed a new explanation for this phenomenon: Prototypical faces are pleasing because they're easy for the brain to process.

"The principle finding is that you like a pattern to the extent that you classify the pattern fast," the study's author and psychologist at the University of California, San Diego Piotr Winkielman said.

On the one hand, this is pretty old-hat to anybody in the design business, and particularly anyone in the interface design business (web or otherwise).

We all learned in UI 101 that (a) a good operative definition of "usability" is that a user doesn't have to think about how to do what she's going to do, (b) that one of the best ways we can accomplish this is give them interface elements that they've already learned how to use.

On the other hand, the Gestalt Laws of Prägnanz provide us with some formal figurations that explain why our brains like puzzles.

Just as doing a bit of physical exercise, mental exercise is not only helpful to us in the long run, but can provide an "adrenaline-rush".

A simple Gestalt 'Figure-Ground' puzzle

So, obviously our designs should be created to take advantage of our user's perceptual fluency both positively (providing familiar UI components) and negatively (using Gestalt and other techniques to provide users with the endorphin-rush of solving a simple visual puzzle).

The really interesting question is whether you can do both of these things at once in a way that preserves the value of each. Now that's a design problem.

I was over at a friend's house last night, doing design research (read: drinking bourbon and playing video games), and found myself momentarily distracted from my pleasant Kentucky-style buzz by the jaw-dropping visual assault Super Smash Bros. Brawl for the Nintendo Wii.

Nintendo draws on its deep stable of characters to create a tightly branded interactive experience.

O! Insidious Nostalgia

Super Smash Bros. Brawl is a branding tour de force. Level designers Kazuhire Irie, Takeshi Suzuki, and Kou Arai have situated the game as a living history of the Nintendo product line, adopting a wide range of design styles to recreate elements of Nintendo's extensive mythology in a way that allows the player to simultaneously:

1. indulge in the thrill of recognition
2. have an enormous amount of fun game-playing
3. be spoon-fed nostalgia for the commercial products of yesteryear, or else feel an immense need to play catch-up ("Why would they have a level from Earthbound? I never played that.") as part of a not-so-subtle upsell. All the original games are available for $4-5 directly from your Wii.

Visually meshing the old with the new, you can see the living history of 30 years of Nintendo.

These three things in combination provide an almost narcotic Gestalt effect that all branding and identity designers could learn something from. It's branded fun.

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