ABC isn’t the only network having issues.  The article also mentions that CBS is having problems, too, and NBC, which is the only broadcast network (aside from FOX) to operate its own cable news channel, is apparently in the minority when it comes to making a profit–funny, considering that their ratings are generally terrible.

Add to that the fact that you can’t go more than twenty feet in any direction without encountering someone who complains about the bias that has creeped into today’s broadcast journalism.  Some say FOX News is slanted to the right (enter Media Matters), while others cry that MSNBC is slanted to the left (welcome, NewsBusters)–it’s the same song-and-dance all day long, every day, every week, every month.  Never mind whether or not the accusations are actually true, because in my book it’s irrelevant.

In my mind, the answer to most, if not all, of these problems is quite simple.  News divisions simply have to stop being required to make a profit.

This isn’t a radical idea, though on its face it may seem so.  Back in the early days of television (and I’m talking the Cronkite-and-earlier years, when television cameras weighed thirty pounds and often had a separate belt-attached tape recorder), news programs were entities unto themselves.  They were exempt from the expectations of profit, and because they were under no constraints, they were able to produce quality journalism and deep investigative reports.

Unfortunately, shortly after the Today show era came along (the one in which a chimp was considered a legitimate expense for a news division), network honchos realized that news departments were a potential goldmine, and the revolving door of coiffed anchors with pearl-white dental veneers started spinning furiously.  Fluffy material was being spun like cotton candy–anything to make money.

Honestly, when was the last time you saw something from a television news division that told you something you didn’t already know?  Recently Neil Cavuto of the FOX News Channel (not to mention the fledgling FOX Business Network–he’s also a News Corporation vice president of some stripe) had Martha Stewart on his program to hawk her products.  For those of you who have been in a coma for the past twenty years, Martha Stewart has a product line that she’d like to sell to you.

Translation: News outlets today are not delivering the news. They are instead delivering the most controversial or sensational material in an attempt to garner the most eyeballs which translate to advertiser dollars.  The loser in this equation is the common man who is increasingly forced to scrape and scrounge to find an unbiased news source, and failing that, the same story from multiple angles just to rule out any possibility of institutional bias.  (Good luck there.)

The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism conducted a round table in which they posed the question, “In the long run, looking back, have the networks benefited or suffered from the requirement that each newscast be a profit center unto itself? Put another way, do you think a network is the sum of its parts or something more abstract than that?”  The answers were largely not illuminating, though two of the panelists made interesting statements.  Tom Bettag, a former executive producer at Nightline and now an executive producer for Discovery Networks, said that the push to derive profit from news divisions meant that “the networks might have hurt themselves by damaging the credibility of their news divisions.”

I agree with Bettag.  I also agree with Jeff Grainick, who has worked for all three broadcast networks (presumably excluding FOX?) for 48 years, who said:

…special events and breaking news coverage and programming has always been and will always be a loser. So network news divisions are the sum of their parts with the profitable broadcasts making possible the necessary and non-profitable.

The problem is this: Networks are the sum of all their parts so they are placing pressure on their news divisions to return “more to the corporate bottom line.” The drive to meet the corporate mandate means there is less and less of the discretionary breaking news and documentary programming that can be done.

So if the question is, is profit motive a danger the answer is “yes” but without profit motive how does American business function? PBS is the model for the risks to survival associated with non-profit.

Grainick’s answer reveals the heart of the problem.  Broadcast media as a whole is dying–not as rapidly as print, mind you, but the Internet is certainly hastening the demise of the broadcast networks (see cable networks, TiVo, Slingbox, iTunes, et. al.).  If news divisions of broadcast networks want to force themselves back into relevancy, someone somewhere is going to have to just suck it up and accept the monetary loss.  Until then, we’re going to be stuck watching Kathie Lee Gifford and Hoda Kotb snicker at Richard Simmons’ latest weight loss gimmick for an entire hour of broadcast television every single morning.

I, for one, wish I was getting real information in that same hour.

I don’t know how many of you have been to Newark Airport, but the security screening checkpoints there are set up the same way as they are at many other airports–three to five “lanes” alongside one “exit lane” where arriving passengers can leave. (You can see the exit lane in this photo–it’s from the New York Daily News story above.)  This exit lane is generally unobstructed and may be observed by a TSA agent, though sometimes it is not.  Some, but not all, of these lanes are also closed off by doors that are locked from the inside, but if a big flock of passengers are all headed to baggage claim, those doors can be held open indiscriminately.

These wrong-way security breaches could be stemmed entirely with just a little bit of design know-how.  What about an automated high-capacity revolving door, for example?  Or perhaps an “airlock” type of design with one set of doors on either side?  They could be set to let people out, not in, and be locked down automatically if necessary.

This kind of breach just strikes me as a big waste of everyone’s time and money.  Perhaps that’s stating the obvious.  But it should be equally obvious that preventing these breaches is almost ludicrously simple.

He also doesn’t like it when people complain.  If I kvetch, I’m also expected to suggest how to fix whatever it is that’s bugging me.  So, if I’m banging my head against my desk because I’m struggling to design a new webpage (or whatever), he sometimes will put my peril into perspective by saying things like “That’s frustrating?  No, no… frustrating is [insert various perilous oil-related story here].  Frustrating is [insert an increasingly improbable-sounding oil story here]. Etc.”

As rich of a person he’s become through all of his experiences, I think it’s important to point out that he has made me cringe more than once by trying to design a logo in Microsoft Excel.  He routinely drives me crazy by noting that (probably thanks to his parochial school background) he prefers symmetrical designs to those that are not.  From what I’ve been able to ascertain, there’s a certain harmony that he draws from symmetry; asymmetrical designs wreak havoc with that music.

He’s a different person than I, and his experiences are vastly different from my own.  That said, I’m sure he absorbs at least a fraction of the amount of sheer brainpower, effort, energy, refinement and polishing that goes into designing a successful interface just by virtue of the fact that he sits less than fifteen feet from me.  He’s also learned, just by osmosis, that when I talk about a  “successful” interface, there is but one metric to evaluate that.  A “successful interface” is one that is so simple and so elegant that users just naturally understand it.  If a user thinks just a single time something like “How do I…” and abandons the task, the design is a failure.  It’s a zero-sum game.  (He’s a numbers guy–he’s picked up on that. Believe me.)

People like me are paid to come up with “perfect” interfaces, and I’ll tell you firsthand that we aren’t successful every time.  Rare indeed is the project where I hit a home run on the first inning–more often, I’ll come up with an idea and have it implemented only to later come up with a half-dozen “patches” to fix holes in my solution that I didn’t initially see.  Just like a tire, you can make repairs so many times, but eventually you just have to scrap the whole thing and start over from scratch.

So I hope this explains why, over the years, I’ve had so many days where I’ve been at the office until 7 or 8 PM at night and why I’ve been so tired/crabby when I’m out and about.  The truly hilarious part of all of this is that it’s utterly amazing and terribly gratifying in the end to see my work… well, work.

“We think the police department has an obligation to get information out to the community through whatever means or mechanisms we have at our disposal,” said Lakeland Police Assistant Chief Bill LePere. “Traditional media releases, expecting the local print media to pick it up and run it in the newspaper tomorrow, is 24 hours too late.” … Public safety officials are finding the use of sites [like Facebook and Twitter] to be not only speedy, but also a convenient way to distribute press releases, Amber alerts, road closings and suspect descriptions.

Twitter is an ideal platform for this kind of rapid information dissemination, and it’s easy enough to use that even the non-tech savvy can get on board.  I applaud the police and fire departments that have chosen to use these tools, and I encourage more to jump on board.

Given his background, I can appreciate that his definition of frustration clearly involves a degree of physical brawn and time waste that I don’t have to deal with.  But, in my own defense, I think it’s also fair to say that he, as a non-designer, may not fully see the amount of sheer brainpower, effort, energy, refinement and polishing that goes into designing a successful interface.

What I call a “successful interface” is one that is so simple and so elegant that users just naturally understand it (including my boss!).  If a user–any user–has to think at all about what he or she is doing, the design is a failure.  It’s a zero-sum game, and it’s incredibly challenging, especially in instances where you may have to defy conventions because you’ve found that the conventions don’t hold true in your particular frame of reference.

People like me are paid to come up with these perfect interfaces, and I’ll be the first to admit that we aren’t successful every time.  Rare indeed is the project where I hit a home run on the first swing of the first inning.  What usually happens is that I’ll come up with an idea and have it implemented only to later be forced to make a half-dozen “patches” to fix holes that I didn’t see in my initial solution.  Just like a tire, you can make repairs so many times, but eventually you just have to scrap the whole thing and start over from scratch.

So let this serve as my mea culpa to my friends and loved ones.  In recent weeks I’ve been under an increasing amount of pressure to make this kind of magic happen multiple times over.  I will say, though, that  it’s utterly amazing and terribly gratifying to see my work… well, work.

Says an MTA spokesman:

We did have a recent problem with a car builder who took it upon themselves to manufacture and apply subway car decals without the prior approval of NYC Transit. The cars were delivered to NYC Transit with the wrong decals. They have since been instructed not to do so going forward, and those that were applied in error will be replaced with NYC Transit approved and manufactured decals.

Obviously in some cases (even amongst the logos I’ve posted above) there are periodic updates here and there–the “BMW” typeface has changed over the years, for example, and the Apple logo used to be in rainbow colors (and, interestingly, the IBM logo used to be solid), but these logos have never been radically altered from their original forms.

Sometimes, though, companies unintentionally (and sometimes very intentionally) wreck their longstanding corporate identity when they modify their logos, and I can’t quite figure out why.

In some cases, longstanding logos are simply modified poorly–this is what recently happened to the Pepsi logo, the AT&T globe, and the Xerox typesetting.

Motives for “rebranding” certainly vary; sometimes it’s necessary, especially when a company has made a drastic change and wants to reposition itself (see, for example, Sprint’s use of a black-on-bright yellow scheme that worked very well and differentiated it drastically from its competitors).  However, when companies have a perfectly well-established brand that is identifiable and iconic, as with these three, fiddling with the logos amounts to not much more than meddling.

The powers that be at Xerox, for example, felt that their identity was too “stodgy.” (Never mind that their red “X,” designed by Chermayeff & Geismar of NBC peacock fame, had been in use since 1961.)  To paraphrase a company press release, management apparently just wanted to “freshen” the brand.  Unfortunately, they ended up with something that looks similar to the Xbox 360 logo while also seeming completely random.  The biggest sin here is that their old red “X” was truly transcendent in many ways–it was a true visual metaphor, a graphic depiction of the conversion of digital information into the printed word.  While I won’t dispute that the Xerox wordmark could have used an update, choosing a lowercase sans-serif that looks like it belongs on a package of supermarket-brand cookies was a questionable choice.  Putting it alongside a logo that looks like it could either be a cough drop or a dog toy doesn’t help.

AT&T’s reasons for rebranding were similar.  It’s ironic to me that, on the day it became “the nation’s largest telecommunications company,” AT&T began using a new logo that allegedly illustrates “clarity and vision” as well as a “more welcoming and accessible image.”  Good thing the company issued a press release explaining these things, because when I think of corporate behemoths, words like “welcoming” and “clarity” don’t exactly spring to mind, especially when considering a logo that looks like the Death Star.

Pepsi’s reasons for rebranding are a bit more esoteric.  An Advertising Age article seems to indicate that the company saw a rebranding campaign as “an opportunity to bring humanity back” by allegedly deploying a series of similar logos that are supposed to look like “smiles” (no, I’m not making that up):

The new logo is a white band in the middle of Pepsi’s circle that loosely forms a series of smiles: A smile will characterize brand Pepsi, while a grin is used for Diet Pepsi and a laugh is used for Pepsi Max.

At the very least, Pepsi retained a circular shape for the logo as well as the red and blue colors, but the first time I ever saw the new logos and packaging I couldn’t help but think that the designer was a first-time user of Adobe Illustrator who simply gave up before finishing the job.  Advertising Age notes that Pepsi has made over its logo five times in the past 21 years, but I’d hasten to point out that these modifications were much smaller and generally involved shifting the position of the word “Pepsi;” the overall yin-yang shape of the logo has remained the same since 1962.  Unlike that original iconic design, I wager that these new skewed “smiles” will not be sticking around for 47 years.

Want an example of how bad rebranding can totally ruin a brand?  Take a look at this:

While it’s apparent that you’re looking at cartons of orange juice, what isn’t as readily apparent is that it’s Tropicana juice (which is–surprise!–a Pepsi product).  Granted, I would hardly call Tropicana’s old white cartons amazingly designed or gorgeous, but they were familiar and instantly recognizable.  These new cartons just look like supermarket generics–and not much more than that.

In many ways, these various revisions all seem to indicate that we’re in a kind of “3D era” with certain cues taken from the Swiss International style (e.g., the sans-serif fonts and adherence to grids).  The AT&T globe, the Xerox “ball,” and other logos like the recently updated UPS shield all employ shading and lighting techniques to simulate 3D surfaces.  It all adds a veneer of complexity that I personally feel is unneccessary.

In fact, because I’m starting to sound like a broken record, I’d like to point out one recent packaging redesign that I was delighted with.

If you aren’t a designer, and maybe even if you are, this one might have slipped under your radar.  Turner Duckworth is the agency responsible for stripping away all of the can’s extraneous elements and random textures, leaving only a clean iconic design that looks appealing and that will look fresh years from now.  Coca-Cola understood that its logo is timeless, its color palette is its signature and that its branding didn’t need a major overhaul–it just needed to be pared down to its purest form so that its message could be effectively communicated with minimal chatter.

If this entry has an overarching point, it’s simply that graphic design (especially branding and packaging work) can be extremely ephemeral.  It’s rare (but delightful) to find a logo or wordmark that hasn’t been changed simply because it doesn’t need to be changed.  Isn’t the point of a corporate identity to differentiate a company from everyone else?  I certainly think so, and that’s why it’s discouraging to see iconic logos discarded in favor of looks that grope at and emulate other “current” styles.  This is, in a sense, nothing more than succumbing to peer pressure, and the result is a bombardment of shiny faux-3D icons that all look the same–and that’s a true shame.

By all rights, it sounded like it should have been a lively discussion, especially considering that the moderator was Christine Muhlke, a deputy editor of T: The New York Times Style Magazine, who (at least on paper) seemed like she should’ve been an ideal person to get these disparate voices conversing with each other about the extremely multifaceted topic of “food and design.”

I am extremely sad to report that the event was less than a success.

From the venue I posted on my Twitter feed how I was feeling at the time–that the organization of the event was practically nonexistant and that it almost seemed like no one had a real handle on what was going on.  The event, which was supposed to start at 7 PM, didn’t actually begin until much closer to 7:30 PM; for whatever reason, we were kept waiting in one line to retrieve our tickets (which were not checked) and then in another line to enter the auditorium (which was completely empty prior to our event).

Muhlke spent a good ten minutes talking about God-knows-what before introducing AvroKO, who came out and talked for a good half-hour about their restaurants.  It was a bittersweet experience for me–as much as I love Public and as much as I want to visit both Double Crown (and Social House while I am in Las Vegas over New Year’s), I couldn’t help but feel offended by their use of what even they labeled as “offensive” social mores.  For example, they spoke of being inspired by the Hong Kong slum city of Kowloon when designing their opulent Vegas restaurant Social House, which struck me as both insensitive and off-key.  They made several similar incongruous revelations about a couple of their other projects as well; in any case, as stated on Eat Me Daily, they simply “failed to connnect the dots” and ended up sounding like a bunch of overprivileged brats.  It’s one thing to take inspiration from something like the slum of Kowloon, which in a way was admittedly beautiful, but to mock it with gilt candlesticks and mirrors and a high-dollar menu is just distasteful.

I will admit that, even as something of a foodie, I had no idea what Goldfarb was talking about (apparently his modus operandi is to come up with bad puns and then work backwards from there to create a dessert that has something to do with it), and Barber’s overly lengthy lecture on “natural” foie gras struck me as almost wholly irrelevant to design.  To make matters even worse, Bologna’s jaw was wired shut and he was difficult to understand, though his slide show of restaurants that his agency has designed was interesting though a bit repetitive after a while.

In any case, the various speakers all exceeded their allotted times and ran twenty minutes over, so there was no time for any sort of discussion; instead, the several hundred of us who had come to this event were dismissed simultaneously to the exceedingly narrow antechamber directly behind the auditorium for “dinner.”  (Translation: Each of us was given two tickets, each of which was redeemable for a paltry sample from one of six food and/or drink carts located in said hallway.  We were told that if we wanted more, we’d have to buy more tickets, regardless of the fact that the event was $40 for the general public and $20 to AIGA members.)

All of that serves as a lengthy preamble to the real reason that I entitled this post “taking design for granted.”  Clearly no one at AIGA New York gave more than an iota of thought to the arrangement of the food tables outside of the auditorium.  At almost the exact same time, several hundred ravenous individuals all stampeded out into a hallway that was no more than twenty feet wide to collect food samples from six tiny tables.  There was no traffic direction, no organic flow to the crowd… and only one exit at the far end of the hallway that couldn’t even be reached without shoving through a food- and drink-wielding crowd.

Did no one–NO ONE–consider, at least for a fraction of a second, that hundreds of bodies carrying bags and wearing bulky winter coats who would be carrying plates of food and cups of drinks would not have enough space to maneuver through such a packed crowd?  Did NO ONE have enough common sense to look at his or her watch and do some simple arithmetic on a piece of scratch paper to know when the various speakers would need to be cut off in order to at least initiate some semblance of discussion and to allow for at least a minor Q&A session?  And did NO ONE realize that Cooper Union’s “Great Hall” is a horridly designed theatre in which there isn’t a single seat whose view isn’t obstructed by columns?

Clearly there was a lack of foresight on the part of the planners, which breaks my heart.  Designers have absolutely no excuse not to throw stellar events that blow everyone out of the water.  We’re supposed to be experts on things like time management, traffic flow and portion control.  Have we really declined so far as a collective group that all we can do is make things look pretty?  Do we have no other abilities anymore?

I really hope that this was just an exceedingly good example of “how not to plan an event.”  I understand that mistakes are made and that sometimes things can go cross-eyed, but to have nearly every single aspect of the evening go wrong is just plain sad.

Here’s the trouble (and I fully expect to be blasted here)–I don’t really know that interior decorating, especially in terms of what these contestants are doing on TV, is actually design.  Yes, there are some elements to their work that are design-oriented tasks, such as space planning and furniture arrangement.  Remember, I’m the guy who defines the act of design as the creation of something for a specific practical purpose.  And pasting up wallpaper, setting a dining table and gluing plates to the wall alongside pieces of glitter-coated driftwood is not the creation of something for a specific practical purpose… it’s decorating.  It’s styling.  It’s applying a veneer of attractiveness (or not) to a setup that is largely functional as-is.  In some cases, I’d even say that decoration can go too far and actually hinder the usefulness of a functional design.

When you get right down to it, a plain white couch in a plain white room is just as functional as a leather couch in a room with orange zebra-striped walls.  That veneer of decoration didn’t do much for the functionality of the room, but it does enhance its sex appeal (assuming that the decorator knows what he or she is doing and that his or her taste matches your own).  Thus, I suggest we have the name of the show changed to “Top Decorator.”

Natural disasters aside, I think the biggest problem facing the nation right now–the root cause, if I may be so bold, of many of our other issues–is the stunning lack of logical reasoning and reading comprehension skills amongst wide, wide swaths of our population.  I am constantly amazed by people who are completely incapable of digging even slightly below the surface of media.  It seems that most of the time, most people are happy to simply skim the news and pretend that they have a sufficient grasp of the issues.

Statistics would seem to be on my side here, as the United States seems to fall further and further behind in measures of reading comprehension, science aptitude and mathematics aptitude year after year.  Public opinion polls demonstrate every day that the American people are fundamentally unable to recognize rhetoric or tricky wording–you see it every time the same question is asked two different ways and yet the results are wildly different.

Sadly, it would seem that broadcasters and media producers seem to understand this pathetic reality all too well, considering some of the offerings that have appeared on the airwaves as of late. Have we fallen so far that programs like Deal or No Deal , which requires virtually no cognitive skills whatsoever to play (just a vague understanding of the concept of "more vs. less"), and now Hole in the Wall on FOX, which is a heinous imported game show that does nothing but ridicule body stereotypes, are all the American people want?

This program is not, sadly, a joke–contestants stand next to an alarmingly neon green pool while a giant Styrofoam wall flies towards them.  The only object–to contort one’s body to fit through an oftentimes ridiculously shaped hole.  (The "host’s" constant repetition of the dirty-sounding phrase "It’s TIME… to FACE… the HOLE" doesn’t help matters in the slightest.)

In America, you see, it’s funny to watch a heavyset woman be knocked into a pool of chlorinated water because she can’t pose like a ballerina.  It’s hilarious to see two Baywatch -esque lifeguards with abs of steel heft her out of the water as she sputters and flails.  It’s entertaining to watch mismatched teams of questionable athletic ability embarrass themselves all in the name of entertainment–and for a minuscule amount of prize money, most of which will be eaten away by taxes anyway.

Yes, it’s fair to say that this kind of idiotic and exploitative entertainment makes me angry.  What makes me angrier, though, is the fact that Americans would want it in the first place.