Dangerous Design Decisions

    Having dedicated designers is important, even more so when dealing with potentially dangerous products. The following, for example, are two aerosol spray cans that carry insecticide and cooking oil. Having these products look similar is bound to cause at least one mix-up resulting in injury. A simple design board could have avoided this problem, even something as subtle as inverting the two colors (black and yellow) on one of the cans could have been a solution. Design flaws such as these are everywhere, preventing them is the bare minimum a designer should do.

                                                             (img source: http://i.imgur.com/zSpVbou.png)

    Product recalls are one way of dealing with the aftermath of bad design. Hasbro's easy-bake oven was a children's toy that let children cook some foodstuffs using electric heating. After selling almost a million units it had to be recalled because children got their hands trapped inside the doors, resulting in burns and blunt trauma. I personally am old enough to remember the extensive ad campaign but it is only recently that I heard about this recall (the recall occurring in 2007). At the time I wasn't old enough to realize the absurdity of giving a child a plastic enclosed heating element, but that same ignorance was also followed by many adults who deemed it just fine and bought the toys for their children. One just naturally assumes that if something is being advertised that heavily then it must be safe, and that it probably already passed all the necessary tests or else it wouldn't even be on the market. So where does the blame lie? the producer or the consumer? My answer would be "it depends". In the first case that we examined (the cooking oil/insecticide case) it is clear that the designers did not plan sufficiently well, but in the easy-bake oven scenario the blame can go either way. Why make a toy that can potentially burn a user? and why buy a toy that can potentially burn your child? perhaps it is the grandness of the institutions that lead to these oversights. Hasbro is a large company and with any large company some mistakes can be overlooked by the thought process "someone else will fix it", as for the adults that buy the toys, the thought process saying "all the other adults are buying it for their children so it's probably safe enough" leads to such outcomes. Sometimes bad designs can lead to injury, it is for this reason that safety boards need to be very strict. Which is good for everybody, companies don't need to worry about expensive recalls, and consumers are less likely to be injured by conventional use of the products they buy.

Source for easy-bake recall information: https://www.cpsc.gov/recalls/2007/easy-bake-ovens-recalled-for-repair-due-to-entrapment-and-burn-hazards/

Depth of a Logo

    What makes a logo memorable? Is it the amount of information it conveys about the company, i.e name, product, or industry? Or is it something as basic as having a good color scheme and eye catching shapes? I would argue that the most memorable logos are the minimalist ones. Conveying more information with less noise makes a brand instantly recognizable. The apple Logo for instance need not contain anything other than a grey able for it to be recognized, the same with the golden arches of McDonalds. Some logos are able to condense more information in fewer imagery by hiding tidbits of information within the icons themselves.

    From my personal experience however, the most memorable Logo I have encountered, and the logo which makes me pay attention to it each time I see it, is the standard FedEx logo. After having been told about the hidden iconography I could never ignore the logo again. Although it is a fairly simple shape, the arrow found between the ‘E’ and the ‘x’ in FedEx is something which catches my eye time and time again. This has led me on a search for more hidden icons, a few of which can be seen in the following image.

Image credits: Rikard, Zevendesign.com, Apr 7^th,2015 (http://www.zevendesign.com/how-to-design-a-logo/)

    These images make the consumer think twice about logo, and if the goal of marketing is capturing and holding the interest of the consumer then hiding these little Easter eggs are a great way to do it.