design

I finished two huge projects this week.

Jenny and I signed the final papers on the sale of our house on Tuesday. At work we launched the new design for MercyCorps.org. A little weird that this second project predated the first but they concluded in reverse order. When I started the redesign, I had no glimmer that when it launched I’d no longer be living on Spring Garden Street.

In February the Mercy Corps web team undertook to redesign just the homepage of the website. Quickly this became a site redesign. (When everyone says the website is “too dark,” that’s a good sign you need to lighten your website.) The intervening crises in Japan and the Horn of Africa slowed progress somewhat. But I can’t argue with the product. My work at Mercy Corps fills me with a pride of purpose that I never felt before. Every design I produce here is better than the one before. Which means that every week I’m producing the best work of my life.

Also in February, Jenny declined to renew her teaching contract, to undertake the rearing of our family on a fulltime basis. I didn’t see it leading to the sale of our house but after four months of belt-tightenting and debate, it just made sense. (When you’re using words like “gut” to describe what you need to do to two-thirds of your house to make it ideal for a family of four ... maybe you need a new house.) We lived in this house almost four years, the longest I’ve held a single address since I was 16.

About a month ago I joked on Facebook:

Now that my life is half over, I have decided to have a midlife crisis.

OK, that’s it, I’m done. We sold our house and moved into the forest. And I produced, yet again, the best work of my life. I’m exhausted from these endeavours. A minute of silence please for the poor white man.

Meanwhile, in Somalia:

The hed on this Ad Age post is Survey Finds 51% of Men Are Primary Grocery Shoppers, but Few Believe Advertising Speaks to Them

Can I get an “amen?”

I find grocery ads actively off-putting. They project archaic gender roles that aren't much like the reality of our lives. All those smiling housewives serving juice or fretting over carpet odors. Who lives like that in 2011?

Even the retail experience at many stores is hostile to men. It encourages traversing the store in a front-to-back slog instead of a precision strike mission, and God help you if you forget something on aisle 1. Even the magazines at the checkout are unreadable. It's either People (at Krogers) or Yoga Today (at Whole Foods).

Warehouse stores and Trader Joes are awesome because they are no-nonsense: generic, basic, cheap. TJ's is especially good because of the limited selection, I don't have to waste effort choosing between eleven kinds of frozen peas.

There is a huge and growing ad market for basic household necessities: men. Get on this, ad people!

Because every designer is apparently required to have an opinion about the (now scrapped) new Gap logo, I feel compared to clarify:

This design monstrosity is nothing like the scrapped new Tropicana logo, or the despised new Pepsi brand.

Those two designs may have been grotesque misfires and branding nightmares. But they displayed a lot of planning, thought, effort, and aesthetic sensibility. All of which may have been wrongly applied, sure, but a lot of grownup work anyway. When I first saw those designs, I may have thought “whoa, those are terrible logos and lousy branding.” But I never thought “that looks like a really lazy joke.”

Which is what I thought when I first saw the new (now scrapped) Gap logo. I thought it was a joke.And not a joke that anyone put a lot of effort into. It seems almost calculated in its laziness: it wasn’t undesigned enough to look like an anti-logo (think American Apparel) — because of the cheezy blue box. But the blue box wasn’t cheezy enough to suggest someone had put a lot of thought or effort into (at least) using a crafty Illustrator transform or something (e.g. the new Burger King logo). It was a goddamn gradient. Not even a tricky gradient, like with extra stops or a mesh. (Not that those things would have made it “better,” necessarily, but they would have at least signalled someone worked on it for more than ten minutes). Lazy lazy lazy.

Those other efforts — Tropicana, Pepsi, Jack in the Box, whatever — for all their failures had the virtue of looking like something professional grownups conceived and executed in good faith.