Thoughts @ Large: 64
Posted on January 25, 2020 by CHC   ᐃ ᐁ

• I recently noticed that the water pressure in our shower was low and that the flow rate dropped when another faucet opened or a toilet was flushed.  This never used to happen.  So I looked at the situation and figured that the pressure regulator on our water supply was either filled with sediment or some internal part was broken.

the do-it-yourself bible of my younger yearsIn the old days, armed with my well-worn Reader’s Digest Complete Do-It-Yourself Manual, I would have shut off the water and taken apart the regulator to see if I could clean it out myself and save us some bucks.  But here is where a few decades of life pays its rewards.  It is more likely I would have taken the thing apart only to have some piece crumble in my hands, and then the hardware store would have no replacement part because the manufacturer went out of business, and meanwhile we have no water and someone is now standing in front of me asking when I’m going to turn on the water because someone has to get a shower and leave for an appointment in an hour.  Intuiting that, present-day me decides to call a plumber.  Experience has a way of teaching things that do-it-yourself books and videos never cover.

• I make a mean tossed salad, I really do.  Invite me for dinner someday and I will raid your produce drawer, and probably a few other places in your pantry, and if given enough warning I will bring other fresh goodies with me (maybe even radishes) and then I will make excellent salads for all of us, custom-prepared so that Person A can have her broccoli and bleu cheese while Person B enjoys his black olives and ranch.  I may not cook worth a damn but I could have had a stellar career as a greens-tender, if such a position existed.

• I really thought there were still a few absolutes in life, some things that, even in these fractured times, every rational person can agree on.  For example, though I do not share their passion, I understand why nature-lovers object to bear traps.  And while I think the alt-educated people who refuse to vaccinate their children are supremely misguided and negligent, the damage caused by their selfishness is, for now, limited.  But I draw the line at mosquito activists.  Mosquito activists!

• What would it be like if we had no heritage?  By that I mean, what would we be like, what would our cultures be like, if we lived our lives based on what we personally experienced and not the dusty heritages that our parents and relatives drummed into us, defining and confining our actions and reactions?  It may be that most of us, the world over, adopt and cultivate our own heritage-brand that we then operate under, carving out our narratives from our kindred’s experiences while acting as if we experienced their events ourselves.

• Last fall, my friend Eric introduced me to the Spelling Bee game in the New York Times and I am now hooked.  It’s a game that doesn’t last more than a day, one can leave it and pick it up at will, and while it offers more challenge than an everyday word-search, one is spared all the weightiness of solving the crossword puzzle.  And for me, the Spelling Bee also offers a meta-level of amusement arising from my attempts to find longer, compound words hiding among the seven letters provided that day.

Here are a few examples I found (with my definitions) that I am sure amused only me:

  • BABYLIT  –  children’s books with washable pages?
  • NAGBOT  –  someone who reminds you of the obvious, over and over again
  • KNOBBOY –  the doorman’s understudy?
  • LAXABIT –  the pill you take when you only have to go a little
  • HAMDOWN  –  annual barbecue and fiddle festival in Ames, Iowa

Needless to say, none of these words were accepted.

• P.S.  A quick update on our water supply pressure regulator.  The plumber replaced it.  Pressure and performance is back to normal.  Cost: $300.  Makes me think I should have at least tried to clean or replace it myself — could have saved a few bucks.  I’ll never learn.

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CHC Comics No. 9
Posted on January 21, 2020 by CHC   ᐃ ᐁ

Klobuchar Trump Voter Editorial Cartoon by Craig H Collins

Editorial Cartoon by Craig H Collins

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Bad Signs
Posted on January 16, 2020 by CHC   ᐃ ᐁ

Your faithful correspondent has been a self-appointed arbiter of bad design ever since he read “The Design of Everyday Things” by Don Norman in the 1980s.  My chosen specialty  is poorly-composed signs.  The explicit purpose of signs is to direct, instruct and clarify; any sign that fails its basic mission should be put out of our misery.

I thought I’d share some examples from my Bad Sign Hall of Shame.  I normally don’t wish people ill, but the design-school dropouts who created these monstrosities should go visit a corn maze someday and never find their way out.

Yes, I am rather ruthless when it comes to bad signs.  Maybe I was born under one.

Which Way to the Ice Machine?

At left (click to enlarge) is a sign in the 5th-floor hallway — at least they got that right — of the Richmond Marriott in Innsbrook, Virginia.  Spare elegance was the byword in the design of their signage, floated behind glass and with generous margins.  Unfortunately, the sign gives no clue whether the ice machine is to the right or the left.

My solution to the problem is shown at right.  First, take note of Collins Design Principle #1 — directional arrows that point to the right should be in the right margin and those that point to the left should be in the left margin.  Arrows should never point back to their own labels.

Moving the ice label to the top and giving it an arrow of its own eliminates all ambiguity and increases readability.  I also added an ice-crystal symbol for non-English speakers.  Marriott Hotels, please contact me.  My rates are reasonable.

And by the way, your ice machine was broken.

Center-Up-Down, Left-Up-Down, Right-Up-Down

The title of this section refers to how the designer of this Ohio highway sign (left) expected drivers to parse it.  There is no earthly written language that calls for such a feat.  My inner voice says, as I read this sign, “West 90 East, Keep Left 2 Right Turn.”  Huh?  This was such a dog’s breakfast of numbers, words and symbols that I couldn’t help but snap a photo of it, so I could take a better look at the sign when I got home and figure out how to fix it.

The designer (if you can call him that) apparently decided that placing the elements in an unnatural order wasn’t enough to confuse drivers, so he threw out proximity rules as well. Those rules say, among other things, that elements associated with each other should be grouped together and unrelated elements should be set apart.  But here, the destination labels (WEST, EAST) are far removed from their respective turn instructions; and, based on its position, it appears that the right turn arrow refers to Route 2 alone.

That’s not all.  The designer indiscriminately mixed written instructions (KEEP LEFT) with symbolic ones (the right arrow).  People process text differently, and more slowly, than we do symbols.  Each type of element has a specific use and the two are not interchangeable. 

So here’s my solution (right).  I give the sign a header comprised of the two route shields, with a horizontal rule between the header and the instruction columns.  I use a wide gap to define the columns.  I provide both symbolic and written instructions for each direction.  The result is clean, balanced and easy to parse.

The average graphic designer salary in Columbus, Ohio, is only $47,500 a year.  You would think that the Ohio DOT could afford to find a better one at that price.

When is the Bridge Open?

Lastly, here is a sign that was posted near the north entrance of the Woods Memorial Bridge, a swing bridge connecting Beaufort and Lady’s Island, South Carolina.  Besides its obvious clutter and complexity, I had a number of issues with this sign.  Like, who is it for?  Though the sign was installed near the highway, it was really more relevant to boaters, as open means open to watercraft.

In any case, this sign is incapable of being read and comprehended by passing motorists, and it is hardly more intelligible when standing next to it.  For example, does the heading “MONDAY THROUGH FRIDAY EXCEPT HOLIDAYS” apply only to the top section, or to the top two sections, or to the entire sign?  And what do we do with that triple-negative in the upper section, where an except precedes a not which precedes another except?

After doing some research, I discovered that the bridge schedule has been changed multiple times in the past decade, in response to traffic backups in the Beaufort historic district.  So, the sign in the photo may have already been replaced.  In light of the fluid (haha) situation, I offer this: list the times when the bridge always opens on signal, otherwise tell boaters where to find the current schedule.

That’s it for the first and probably last edition of Bad Signs, a small bit of self-indulgence. Sometimes, when I see something I think a 7-year-old could do better, I can’t resist seeing whether a 67-year-old can do it better too.

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