The New York Times reports that Costco and Wal-Mart are ready to start carrying a newly redesigned gallon of milk. They seem pretty awesome, except not. Here, let’s quote a bit:

The jugs are cheaper to ship and better for the environment, the milk is fresher when it arrives in stores, and it costs less.…

But if the milk jug is any indication, some of the changes will take getting used to on the part of consumers. Many spill milk when first using the new jugs.

“When we brought in the new milk, we were asking for feedback,” said Heather Mayo, vice president for merchandising at Sam’s Club, a division of Wal-Mart. “And they’re saying, ‘Why’s it in a square jug? Why’s it different? I want the same milk. What happened to my old milk?’ ”

I suspect that different people will have different opinions about what the problem is here. Some—like the those behind these milk jugs—are saying that people are just too stubborn and need to learn to change with the times. Others—like those who dislike spilling milk, cleaning milk, or having to pour milk for children who can’t lift the redesigned jug—might contend that the problem here is that you ask for feedback before you design the damn jug.

I think it’s great that designers have begun taking things like environmentalism into consideration. But I also think that, at its heart, all product design is fundamentally about the creation of interfaces (according to people who are way smarter than I am). Making a milk jug which saves costs and materials is great—but if it doesn’t function as something people can recognize and use, well, then it’s a failure.

Mind you, this doesn’t have to be an either/or situation. Maybe you remember the new prescription bottle designed by a grad student at the School of Visual Arts. The thing is brilliant: more usable and more environmentally friendly. (Shame on the FDA for ignoring the thing, and kudos to Target for realizing what a step forward it is.)

Whereas the starting point for the redesign of this milk bottle was likely an economic concern, the pill bottle started with a human concern. Namely, the designer’s grandmother took the wrong medication because all prescription bottles tend to look the same, and usually highlight pharmacy branding and other inessential material over more crucial info (like, say, the actual name of the drug, or who the drug is for). The designer went through a number of different versions to see what would work for elderly people and users with sight issues, and ended up with something simple and more efficient.

Will it be worth teaching people the special trick to pour the new milk bottle? Maybe , in the long run, it will. But what would be smarter would be to get a group of people together to represent the interests of the average milk drinker (and pourer) during the design process to make sure that an important group of stake holders is represented. When people start crying over spilled milk, a good designer doesn’t admonish them for it; we go back to the drawing board.

Reading Klaus Krippendorff’s The Semantic Turn: A New Foundation for Design, I am struck by two realizations: one, that the theory behind design that he offers seems quite brilliant to me; and two, that it was only very recently that something clicked in my head such that I was able to understand what the hell he was saying at all. It’s not that he writes with the practiced complexity of French theorists—actually, he’s relatively straightforward—but he is so to-the-point that the text is quite dense with ideas. Moreover, if you’re the kind of reader who just skips every sentence that starts something like, “According to Heidegger…”, then you won’t get very far. However, a patient reader who is undaunted by abstract claims (before he starts offering concrete examples) will be rewarded with a theoretical treatise that explains what could potentially unify so many different fields and practices of professional designers, and how this theory could lead to more sensible products, from websites to furniture and beyond. Of course, it’s a hardcover by an academic press—i.e., priced as if it were printed on pages woven from pure gold—so you should hit up the library for this one.

If you’ve been with us awhile, you might remember that I’ve ranted a bit before about Shepard Fairey’s “obey” product line. His “Andre the Giant has a posse” and “Obey Giant” stickers started as a funky art project and grew into a guerilla marketing campaign for a clothing line sold through overpriced urban boutiques.

From an visually aesthetic standpoint, I’ve always enjoyed his art style, and so it has kind of bugged me that he has billed his work as politically subversive, encouraging reflection on speech and oppression. (Seriously, see quotes from the post linked above.) It’s really hard to make a “power to the people” claim when “the people” need to find a specialty store and shell out fifty bucks for the right to wear your political art in public—especially when plenty of the pieces in your clothing line feature no discernible visual or textual statements beyond a tiny “Obey” label over the pocket that might as well say “Stüssy” or “Volcom” for all that its fashion-conscious wearers care.

And this is why I am glad that Shepard Fairey is going legit.

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Why nitpick things like grammar and punctuation—which most of your nerdy friends are probably anal about already—when you can give people a hard time over typography?

I’ll admit, I really don’t care much about getting vertical vs. diagonal “primes” right unless I’m designing a book for professional publication, but it does get my goat when people screw up the direction of quotes and apostrophes. Remember, on a Mac anyway, it’s pretty easy to change the ‘80s (see that apostrophe facing the wrong way?) into the ’80s (ahh, much better). Don’t leave it to smart quotes when you can do Option Left-Bracket for double quotes and Right-Bracket for single quotes (and hold down shift to make them face the other direction). [Edited to be representative of how the mistake would look in Microsoft Word; apparently Wordpress actually rendered the first example correctly on the first try!]

There … I’ve gotten it off my chest. And used a proper ellipsis for a change, just to try it on for size.

The New York Times features a useful flowchart of geekdom.

Curious about its designer, I googled “Sam Potts,” and came upon his website. I like it because it is a mockery of graphic (and web) designers’ sites everywhere. I assume that means he doesn’t need to go actively looking for work anymore.

I am constantly amused, occasionally frustrated, and even sometimes impressed by the audacity of graphic designers. Spend a few minutes flipping through a major design criticism magazine (or the archives of well-trafficked design blogs) and you might find that graphic designers seem to think themselves possessed of great powers of understanding, unseen by any who would not call him or herself “a visual person.” The most amusing and consistent manifestation of this audacity is the ruthless critiquing of other people’s design work as being somehow inferior, generally for nit-picky reasons that are about as observable as midichlorians.

All of that said, I have a certain respect for those who go all-out and just call themselves design police. Encouraging others to “bring bad design to justice,” the site offers a number of templates for stickers and labels that one could affix to bad design: “kern this,” “do not use faux bold,” “Microsoft Word™ is not a design tool,” and “consult a graphic designer,” among others. Actually, while some of these seem kind of vague and less than constructive (”this has no personality,” “severe lack of creativity”), I must admit that others reflect stuff I’ve complained/blogged about myself (”Awful library stock photo,” “Comic Sans is illegal“).

All of that said … Design Police, I’m going to have to stick one of your own tags on you: “Idea stolen from: The Graffiti Report Card.”

Holy crap, exljbris, free quality font foundry really is what it purports to be. Free fonts are easy enough to find on the web, but generally, they’re cute but half-assed novelty fonts with poor kerning and limited character sets. Follow that link to some really versatile, well-made fonts with personality. (Thanks Design Observer for the link.)

I recently wrote a post calling for you, my dear friends, to suggest what we might consider a “canonic” or “iconic” web design—something with the aesthetic resonance, recognizability, and influence of, say, Paul Rand’s IBM logo or Massimo Vignelli’s New York City subway map. This was in response to a post by Armin Vit about why there are no “landmark” web designs. My guidelines were simple: Just suggest a damn site and don’t try to explain why the question can’t be answered, as the commenters on Armin’s original post had already hammered that to death.

Well, kudos to those of you who tried, but we didn’t get (and I didn’t offer) much in the way of suggestions. I thought I’d follow that post up, though, as The Legend of Zeldman himself—web designer and critic Jeffrey Zeldman, that is—has chimed in with the best response yet as to why the question is misguided, if not unanswerable. I totally agree with him, except for the parts where I totally disagree.

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Design Observer directed me to this interesting video slideshow on “emotionally intelligent signage.” The basic premise is that signs should be able to more effectively direct us by appealing to our emotions, either displaying empathy on the part of the sign-hangers or encouraging empathy among sign-readers. The presenter behind this, Dan Pink, has also offered some examples of emotionally intelligent road signage designed by 8th graders. (My favorite: “Slow down! You may hurt the future.”)

Some of the examples offered by Mr. Pink are amusing and clever. Of course, when he starts talking about the effectiveness of such signs in actually encouraging or altering behavior, he gets me thinking in researcher-mode. How would one fit this into existing models of communication theory? How would we define this sort of appeal such that we could test it? I haven’t devoted enough thought to the matter to figure it out, but I welcome those of you taking the “Social Psych” class this year to chime in.

My (somewhat pessimistic) guess is that there is a way we could define this and prove that it can be more effective in some situations, but that effectiveness would probably wear off if this technique were employed as a matter of course with most signage. Eventually, I think that attempts to display or encourage empathy would probably just end up looking more like ads and public service announcements, which we’ve learned to tune out pretty well already.

I have at times lamented that I think that some of Shepard Fairey’s “Obey” designs—on posters, clothing, books, etc.—look kind of cool, but I can’t bring myself to pay for them. I have some kind of aversion to supporting that which is vaguely depoliticized and yet which claims to be highly political and irreverent. I used to think Shepard Fairey’s idea of mimicking ad messages in street art was kind of clever, and then I noticed that I see “Obey” logos and designs much more frequently on expensive designer clothing than on street corners. Generally I’m not inclined to accuse people of selling out because everybody’s got to make a buck, but if you strike the pose of a cultural revolutionary, I expect you to either hold it or find a new gig eventually.

This is a somewhat long-winded way of introducing an essay accusing Shepard Fairey of plagiarism and hackwork. I don’t necessarily agree with the essayist in all examples; “plagiarism” seems kind of a strong word for what plenty of artists consider “appropriation and recontextualization,” as the “Big Brother” example at the forefront of the essay seems to me. The writer acknowledges that “Despite some reservations I generally agree with that viewpoint—provided that such a process is completely transparent,” and yes, most of what follows is anything but. Most of these cases seem like Fairey just traced or copied artwork that he figured nobody would be likely to recognize.

Mostly, though, I wanted to link to this because I’m in agreement with the essay’s critique of Fairey’s depoliticized faux-critical stance, and the essayist makes the point more clearly and eloquently than I do. I’ll quote the final paragraph here because it ends on such a punchy (and, I believe, accurate) note, in case you can’t get read through something that’s almost entirely and inexplicably center-aligned:

If carefully examined, the rebellious patina and ersatz activism of Shepard Fairey’s art gives way to reveal little in the way of political imagination. Ultimately his work is the very embodiment of “radical chic”, bereft of historical memory and offering only feeble gestures, babbling incoherencies, and obscurantism as a challenge to the deplorable state of the world. Such an artist cannot provide us with a critical assessment of where we stand today.