I spent Monday griping about those little bags of screws that come with Target DIY pressboard bookshelves and their like. I also intimated then that the (if not flatly unethical) lame strategies behind them have a couple of lessons to teach us all: Wordpress template factories, real estate agents, Etsy store proprietors, and big three automotive companies alike. As promised:

Be generous

Send me an extra screw, you jerks. (Image via.)

If you make design and logistical decisions using a mentality of maximizing profits, the logical conclusions will all have zero tolerance for error. Case in point the bag of hardware: There is no doubt that sending exactly the correct amount of hardware is the most cost-effective option for these companies, which is why that's what they do. However, when the factory screws up, it costs them huge, leading to frustrated customers, employees, and balance sheets. If they had just planned to throw an extra washer in every bag, they wouldn't have any of these problems.

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We talk a good game about restraint around here, often with regards to features or aesthetics. Restraint means to hold something back, to hold in those impulses for more, and eliminate excesses that might get in the way of user experience. But what about excessive customers?

It’s a problem we’d all like to have, right? But today, I’m going to pose a serious question: Are less customers better than more?

What started me thinking about this was my experience with the Dungeons & Dragons Facebook application. The game was minimalist, but addictive. So addictive, in fact, that the servers were slammed almost immediately.

Everything was going great. Then the server failed its saving roll...

All weekend long, my page requests kept coming back lost, but I persisted. It was annoying, but it didn’t keep me from leveling up my character. By Monday, the application had so much traffic that it was completely unresponsive and was taken offline.

When the servers recovered, the news came that the databases had crashed and everyone’s characters were lost. My halfling rogue was dead and no Resurrection spell could bring him back.

Now, I’ll put up with a lot for something that is free and fun, but after losing all my progress I decided I just didn’t want to play anymore. The spell was broken. They’d lost me for good.

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We've said it before, and we'll say it again. Designing a restrained billboard might be rare, and even culturally antonymic, but when it's done right, it's incredibly effective.

Billboard Advertisement for the Denver Water Public Utility

Here, the Denver Water Public Utility takes the Eskom strategy one step further, actually chopping their billboard down to about 20% of its allotted size. This is not only highly effective because it capitalizes negatively on our perceptual fluency for billboards, but it's also quite apropos to the content. Nicely done.

Billboard Advertisement for the BIC

Secondly, this incredible billboard for BIC razors makes excellent use of many of the principles we at DLB hold dear. Specifically, (1) the aforementioned confounding of perceptually fluent expectations, (2) the Power of Profiles (here, capitalizing on the unique and recognizable shape of the BIC disposable razor), (3) the judicious use of the context/environment of the design, and finally (4) a very interesting (sculptural) complication of the figure-ground relationship.^*

All these excellent factors add up to an almost completely blank billboard. Chew on that.

^* Please note also my near-giddiness that this billboard allows me a second occasion to use the Claes Oldenberg tag.

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.

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