Visitors went to Kensington High Street in London twenty years ago only if they could bear it. Once they arrived, they walked or drove at their own risk. Accidents and fatalities were constant, and the clutter was worse. Tom Vanderbilt, author of Traffic, called the area a forest—“a forest of signs.” The look was a bad collage: streets and sidewalks suddenly would change from concrete to asphalt or brick for no apparent reason.
Kensington High Street was a mess.
The signs had become a forest because borough officials reasonably believed that traffic warning signs accomplished their purpose: By warning people, they reduce accidents. To further ensure that safety, the borough had also erected guardrails on both sides of the streets and painted those familiar zebra-striped crosswalks to tell pedestrians where they could walk safely and where drivers absolutely had to yield.
The problem wasn’t safety at that point. The problem for the Kensington merchants was that the area was so stuffed with signs, lights, guardrails, markings, and speed bumps (“Beware of Speed Bump” signs naturally followed) that it no longer looked like a community. That was a problem, because something dangerous was taking place nearby: a new shopping development that threatened to steal the Kensington merchants’ business was being built.
Kensington’s merchants adopted a reckless-sounding strategy. They decided to remove almost 95 percent of the signs. They eliminated the zebra-striped crosswalks and allowed pedestrians to cross anywhere. To expose walkers to even more risk but beautify the area, the borough even removed all the protective guardrails.
Everyone agreed: Kensington High Street now looked far more welcoming—but that could be a problem. The local shops might increase their store traffic, but the car and pedestrian traffic outside was certain to result in more accidents.
But it didn’t. In fact, the opposite of what everyone predicted occurred. Pedestrian KSIs (Killed or Seriously Injured) dropped 60 percent.
This seems to suggest that the more civilized a place looks, the more civilized we behave in it. This rides on the hotly debated evidence of the success of Rudolph Guiliani’s program of reducing graffiti on New York City’s streets. When that campaign was followed by a reduction in crime, many argued the point: We behave more civilly in civilized-looking environments. And from the Kensington example, it appears that we also walk and drive more carefully in more civilized looking places. Design changes how we act.
Design changes not just our perceptions but our actions. Perhaps we should not repeat the old saw “Never judge a book by its cover,” because covers matter; design alters how we see and feel. The cover is the book; the package is the product.
We probably find ourselves thinking that what is most remarkable about design is this: how superficial it isn’t. Design, even the design of our neighborhoods, changes us—like the colors of our shirts, as we will see next.
Show a four-year-old the photo spread of Tiger Woods’s winning celebrations of more than seventy professional tournaments, and she may ask you what Maggy Stemmer asked me when she saw that photo spread on my table at coffee one morning:
“Why does he have only one shirt?”
It’s a reasonable question. In every photo, Tiger does appear to be wearing the same red shirt. It’s a practice Tiger has followed since he began his professional career: He wears a red shirt on Sundays, the final day of every tournament.
One might assume Tiger is acting as a creature of habit, which he is. But there is more to Tiger’s red-shirt fetish than mere habit; there is shrewd design.
To see why this might be true, let’s leap to the 2004 summer Olympic Games. We likely are familiar with that favorite Olympics shot that NBC captures almost every night of the games. Our national anthem plays while the beautifully toned American athlete stands atop the victory stand—and then it comes: that little tear that trickles slowly down the athlete’s cheek, right about when we hear “the bombs bursting in air.”
As we watch, we imagine the athlete’s feeling of triumph, the exquisite realization that his life’s work has left him standing, literally, on top of the world. As it turns out, there was a lifetime of effort involved. But in many cases, there may have been something else: a red shirt.
After those 2004 Olympics, several anthropologists from Durham University in England studied the results of the games’ four one-on-one combat sports: wrestling (Greco-Roman and freestyle), boxing, and tae kwon do. The researchers then isolated the contests in which, according to the sports’ experts, the contestants were evenly matched. Blue, it turns out, was a good choice of uniform color. The blue-clad athletes fared well—unless they were pitted against athletes wearing red.
What happened then? In red versus blue matches, the red-clad athlete won 60 percent of the time.
The color of the uniforms cannot change the outcome of a contest, can it? And besides, wasn’t that too small a sample? But color does seem to alter our behavior.
In 2009, Juliet Zhu, an assistant professor of marketing at the business school at the University of British Columbia, working with a doctoral student, ran a series of tests. They tested over six hundred participants on several problem-solving tasks, including solving anagrams and memorizing lists of words. Each task was performed against a red, blue, or white screen.
The color red, it turned out, worked like a green light.
Participants taking the test against a red background took off. They solved tasks that required attention to detail—remembering words or checking spelling—better and faster than when they were presented with the same task on a blue background. The phrase “red alert,” then, may be remarkably apt; red does seems to make us more alert to details.
This also suggests that the ancient Egyptians and Chinese knew something. They practiced chromotherapy—cures using colors—and used red to stimulate people, physically and mentally. This stimulative effect that the Egyptians and Chinese found reveals itself in today’s tests, which show that men are more attracted to women wearing red than any other color. This is why we often see red heels on a woman’s CFM shoes—invitations to sex. This finding also makes the use of red for stop lights look like an insight, because a driver must be alert to any stop sign. The cost of missing one often is death. The likely danger in failing to respond to a green light, however, is the shock of hearing a sudden, loud bleat from the car behind us.
Does red clothing stimulate the person wearing it? Does it intimidate the opponent and explain why every golf commentator notices that Tiger’s head-to-head opponents, every Sunday, always play horribly—“as if they are totally intimidated,” the commentators usually add?
Do red uniforms worn in aggressive combat sports, like those four in the Olympics, prompt the judges to see the red combatant as more aggressive and therefore more deserving of the win?
If we still say that’s very unlikely, let’s consider hockey.
Hockey is a uniquely aggressive sport, a trait captured perfectly in a favorite joke: “I went to a boxing match and a hockey game broke out.”
In hockey, fighting and other mayhem are tolerated but penalized: high-sticking, hooking, butt-ending, charging, elbowing, kneeing, kicking, slashing, spearing, and, of course, fighting. Reading hockey’s list of penalties feels like reading a list of medieval battle techniques.
Now, penalties hurt a team. The penalized player must sit out at least two minutes of timed play and five minutes for “major penalties” and cannot be substituted. The penalized team must play a man short, sometimes even two short.
So here is an interesting thought. Might the color of their uniforms affect either the aggressiveness of teams, the number of penalties called against them, or both?
Well, we can start our research in Pittsburgh.
In 1979, the Pittsburgh Penguins were known to be among the mildest-mannered teams of the National Hockey League. Only three NHL teams endured fewer minutes in penalties. After the season, the team management met, argued that the color black was getting big and that penguins are black, and decided to switch to black uniforms from their white and blue ones.
We can guess what happened. The fourth-least-penalized time in hockey became the seventh-most-penalized team—despite the fact that there were now four more teams in the NHL to slash, spear, and head-butt their way into those standings.
Was this just coincidence? If we think so, let’s return to hockey one more time.
In 1978, the Vancouver Canucks had finished in the exact middle of the league for penalties; eight teams had more penalties, eight had fewer. At the conclusion of that season, the Canucks management decided to abandon their white uniforms for black ones.
We guessed it. The Canucks became thugs, apparently. Only two teams in the league were whistled for more penalties than the formerly peace-loving Canucks.
Even more than red, black signifies power. Judges wear black to signal their power over a courtroom and to deliver the implied command that no one in court can do anything that might be punished, literally, as contempt of court. Professors wear black robes to graduation, striped with black velvet sashes and black caps, to convey their authority. Executioners, the hooded men who worked the guillotines, and the Grim Reaper all wear black to signal their power over our final moments. And black, it turns out, figures in golf history, worn by a man who came before Tiger Woods.
Seen from behind, and if you ignore the gray in his full head of coal-black hair, Gary Player looks like an eighth-grader. He’s 5 feet 8 inches and 165 pounds. Yet despite his small frame, Player won 164 tournaments worldwide, including all four of golf’s major tournaments. It’s an accomplishment that only Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods have equaled. Player also is known by his choice of attire: People call him The Black Knight.
Early in his career, Player began wearing only black clothes, offering an explanation we might expect from a small man: “Black makes me feel powerful.” Perhaps it did. And perhaps it made his opponents, whom he vanquished a world-record 164 times, feel much less so.
Design changes minds, changes feelings, changes hockey players and referees, golfers and opponents. Its effect seems clear and almost certainly greater than we might ever have suspected.
Within weeks of the car’s introduction at the New York World’s Fair on April 17, 1964, dealers were forced to auction their supply of Ford Mustangs because they had one car for every fifteen customers who requested one. On Memorial Day, it served as the pace car for the Indianapolis 500; that autumn it appeared in the classic James Bond film Goldfinger; by year’s end, Ford had sold over three thousand cars a day and broken all American car-sales records. Four years later, the Mustang appeared in the Steve McQueen movie Bullitt—the promotional posters made it clear it was McQueen’s costar—figuring prominently in what many regard as the greatest chase scene ever filmed.
Championed by Ford executive Lee Iacocca, the car created an entirely new class of American automobiles called the “pony class,” sport coupes with long hoods and short rear decks, including the Chevy Camaro, AMC Javelin, and Plymouth Barracuda. But the Mustang’s story goes back several years.
Five years before, Ford had introduced a car named for an animal that can travel at two-hundred miles per hour: the falcon. Partly the brainchild of Ford president and future U.S. secretary of defense Robert McNamara, the Ford Falcon initially sold in the millions, a huge volume for its day, but sales soon fell off. By the time Ford executives started considering the idea of a small sports car that would become the Mustang—the winning design was actually called the Cougar—Falcon sales had dropped so dramatically that Ford had surplus Falcon bodies in its plants.
Ten years later, the Falcon would disappear. Never iconic, low in price, and much slower than the predator for which it was named, the Falcon became a memory at best.
The different fates of these two cars seems destined to a reader familiar with automobiles. The Mustang seems an utterly different car than the Falcon, headed to a greatness that anyone could see would elude the Falcon. But it’s hard to miss the irony: The Mustang was a Falcon.
The Mustang team took all those surplus Ford Falcon frames and suspensions and its tiny 170-cubic-inch engine and wrapped the Mustang’s sheet metal around it. The Mustang changed the Falcon’s skirt and hair style and offered add-ons like tachometers and special fuel gauges to enhance the impression of a high-performance car.
And that changed history.
Of course, not any change of skirt and hair style would have worked; Mustang’s design was so inspired that it won the Tiffany Award for Excellence in American Design, a recognition no car had ever won.
Beyond its award-winning design, the Mustang’s historic success also owes a great deal to several other influences stressed in this book. Management’s faith in the car and its shape led them to make an unprecedented effort to plant the Mustang’s name in Americans’ minds. For the night of the car’s unveiling at the World’s Fair, they instructed their ad agency to buy every available time slot on all three of America’s TV networks from 9:30 to 10 p.m., which in turn prompted Time and Newsweek to feature Iacocca and his car on its covers. So Mustang was the story that everyone heard, just like the Kobe Bryant story is the one every basketball player and fan hears today. Overnight, the Mustang was familiar.
The car also appealed to Americans because with just two doors and the Ferrari-like front end that project design chief Joe Oros requested, it was a sports car. It cried out, “Come in and play,” and we love to play.
Finally, the name. The idea of a mustang speaks to one of our treasured American values, freedom: A mustang is an untamed horse running free. That name also evokes our western frontier, which is rich with meaning to us and the inspiration for what once seemed more than half of our television programs: Gunsmoke, Have Gun—Will Travel, The Rifleman, Bonanza, Rawhide (which launched Clint Eastwood), and Wanted: Dead or Alive (which launched McQueen).
The icon remains. For all the battles that Ford has endured and lost, its Mustang remains. Only one other Ford nameplate has been in production longer: Ford’s F-Series pickup trucks. Ford’s other sport car, the Thunderbird, came, went, and reappeared in a homage that failed to recapture that car’s original aura.
Underneath, the Ford Mustang was a Ford Falcon. Yet the Falcon disappeared and the Mustang flourished, thanks to almost overnight familiarity, the promise of play, the implication of freedom, and a brilliant design that turned a mere bird into an icon that broke all the sales records of its day and that proves that even when they cost tens of thousands of dollars, we still buy books for their covers.
One of several hundred bottled waters sold in America, Vitaminwater immediately throws us off its marketing scent. Consider its name. If marketers wanted to create a breakout name for a bottled water, they’d consider names like Aqua Energy, Healthy H2O, or Earth’s Blessing. But if they wanted to attract people who deplore the idea of marketing and to look like they weren’t marketing to us at all, they’d choose the most banal name possible. They’d choose a name like Vitaminwater.
With that name chosen, where would marketers distribute Vitaminwater? Not on the same shelves with energy drinks like Gatorade, because Gatorade could drown it with advertising. Marketers wouldn’t want it to be with sweetened drinks, either, because the Coca-Colas and Pepsis dominate those shelves.
But eliminating those two options leaves the marketers with a dangerous one: battling with several hundred waters on retailers’ shelves. That would pit them against the whizzes at Pepsi, who sell Aquafina; the geniuses at Coca-Cola, who put their mammoth resources behind their boutique brand, Dasani; and the wizards behind that very European-sounding water, Evian.
Even if the marketers could compete against those giants, how would they battle the giant and well-financed Nestlé, which markets six of America’s top-ten-selling waters, including Poland Spring, Arrowhead, and Deer Park, which account for almost one of every five bottled waters sold in America?
They could not wage their marketing war on television. Coca-Cola, Pepsi, and Nestlé would crush them with commercials if they showed their timid face on TV.
So where would they go to get traction? Straight to the grocery shelves. That space costs them nothing; it’s an advertising medium they’ve already paid for.
How would they make the bottle their advertisement? If they slapped on a splashy, look-at-me label, they’d lose the magic and look like other waters. What do they do?
The marketers create an unpackage; they make a package that resembles a fact-packed nutrition label for a medically proven, vitamin-enhanced water. If they do that, many people strolling through the grocery aisles might sense that Vitaminwater is not a water but a medically endorsed daily antioxidant supplement.
They do that by printing the classic medical label, with a Helvetica-like typeface, in black and white.
Now as the brains behind Vitaminwater, marketers make one concession to packaging. They design two parallel rectangles that wrap around the bottle, the lower rectangle in white, the upper rectangle in a color—strawberry red, for example—to match the flavor of that particular water—strawberry, in that case.
Plain. Simple. But still a problem, perhaps. What makes this water different, other than vitamins, which no one will realize are in it if they don’t notice the Vitaminwater bottle first? And they might not notice; dozens of different waters scream for attention from retail shelves.
What do the marketers do? They look at all those other bottles and ask what they share in common.
It’s this: Waters are the color of water; they are colorless.
So what do the marketers do? They add color to Vitaminwater. By doing only that, they haven’t tricked out the banal name or plain package, but the Vitaminwater bottle leaps off the shelf because in a clear sea, its waters leap out: They are red, orange, or blue. Browsers cannot miss Vitaminwater; it’s red in a sea of clear.
By making these changes in creating Vitaminwater, the marketers haven’t appeared to try too hard, so Americans cannot see the marketing cleverness behind the product. They notice this red water, the modest, marketing-free name, and their brains nudge them: “It’s water, but with something more: vitamins! And it’s medically proven.”
It’s brilliant: truly healthy water. It’s brilliant because it oozes simplicity. And it’s brilliant because its brilliance, like David Copperfield’s and Penn & Teller’s and that of other magicians, is hidden from our view.
Part of Vitaminwater’s brilliance, too, is that its executives know that we feel of two minds about brands. Brands attract us, but to some they can seem manipulative. Vitaminwater works because it stands out with no apparent effort and conveys its distinction from the other waters and drinks without saying more than two words: Vitaminwater—an unname with an unpackage.
Genius. Almost equal to that of the next man, who has changed this century.
It came on midnight, August 1, 1998, but we need to go back further to tell the story.
From computing’s early days—the first Altair, introduced to the world in Popular Mechanics in 1974—we often called a computer a “box.” It seemed fitting. Everything was straight lines and sharp edges.
When Apple entered the computer market in July 1976, it created boxes, too. Even when it set out to revolutionize computing, with its heavily promoted 1984 introduction of the Macintosh, these innovators still chose a box, with an almost square screen and a rectangular mouse. Even the Mac icon that greeted us—literally in the first print ads, with the word “Hello”—resembled a square version of a smiley face, set inside a rectangular box.
The tyranny of the box became complete when Apple’s future masters of design introduced their next breakthrough. The name they chose could not have been more fitting: They called it the Cube.
But thirteen years later, Steve Jobs and his Macintosh team were ready with something new: a computer so different that computing purists became even louder in dismissing Apples as computers “for the rest of them,” by which these early adopter/whizzes meant “people without the bandwidth to operate a ‘real’ computer.” Apple announced that it would reveal its masterstroke at exactly midnight, August 1, 1998. They called it the iMac.
The first iMac came in Bondi Blue, the color of California swimming pools. Seeing the success of this color, Apple then introduced Grape, Tangerine, Lime, Strawberry, and Blueberry iMacs, making it possible for customers to own a contradiction: a Blueberry Apple.
But while the color startled people, the shape surprised them more. The iMac was shaped more like a large half-egg, with the curved screen flowing to a rounded rear end. The ovoid was born; the sharp edge was gone. Every iMac team member knew what he had made, a near-clone of what many men consider the sexiest rear end on earth: that of the Porsche 911.
This curvy product changed the industry, as computer companies rushed to copy it. But they’d stuck with the box too long, oblivious to what Steve Jobs knew: We even make our hand axes beautiful, and we create art even when we are struggling to find food.
We crave aesthetics, particularly in an object as large as a computer. It takes up eye space in every room; if it’s beautiful, it takes it up well, pleases us, and says something about us.
The iMac design beautifully incorporates almost everything we’ve talked about here: It is smooth, curved, symmetric, and famously easy to use, the product of the company that invented the phrase “user-friendly.”
Not least of all, owning an Apple sent the Tiffany & Co. signal. Famously expensive, one’s Apple signals to others, “I can afford it.”
The Mac reflected Jobs’s obsession with design. As a famous example of it, Jobs once insisted on changing all the hinges for the front doors of Apple’s award-winning New York Apple stores. He said, “They don’t look quite right.”
Some will say, “Design is fine, but show us the money. What has Jobs’s meticulous attention to design accomplished?” Being among the great percentage of Americans who don’t own a Mac, these doubters probably assume Macs make up not more than 15 percent of the market. Actually, their market share is lower: around 10 percent. But this misses the point. Macs dominate the high-margin end of the computer market; 74 percent of the money spent on computers costing over $1,000 is spent on Macs.
Plus, the Mac merely acted as Apple’s Trojan Horse. It stalked in and brought Apple’s “digital lifestyle products” along behind it: the iPod, iTunes, and the iPhone, each obsessively designed and each integrated with the Mac, which makes the Mac even more attractive.
What has Jobs’s meticulous attention to design accomplished? A year after introducing the Bondi Blue iMac, Apple was worth around $5 billion. Today it is worth $171 billion—more than Google, Cisco, Sun, and every other company in Silicon Valley and all but two other companies in all of America. And today, Steve Jobs himself is worth what all of Apple was just months after introducing Bondi Blue: $5 billion.
On November 23, 2009, Fortune magazine named its CEO of the decade; it was Jobs. Later, it would name his company the company of the year for the third consecutive year. In the November-issue articles saluting him, the word “design” and words related to it, like “aesthetics,” appeared fifteen times. His company has suggested to the rest of the world—one should say shouted to us—the direction of this new century: It is in the direction of our eyes. We think with them.
Steve Jobs is the CEO of the decade, and it is accurate to say this: He got there by design.
He appeared to be a gruff British prime minister with no use for mere design, but Winston Churchill once made a perceptive observation about the unusual influence that design has on us: “People shape buildings, and then the buildings shape people.”
Our creations change us. McDonald’s creates fast food, and just seeing its logo causes us to be less impatient and to read faster, if we are to believe the credible-sounding research of Sanford DeVoe and Chen-Bo Zhong. Our designs and images change us in ways we’d never guess.
In this section, haven’t we seen just how true that is, of streets, computers, hockey jerseys, wrestling uniforms, wine-cooler bottles, Twinkies packages, and ordinary Falcons transformed into iconic Mustangs? We respond to design, particularly when it understands our love of beauty that we demonstrated 400,000 years ago. If something is smooth, spotless, symmetrical, simple, easy, and familiar, it works even more. It makes bar patrons drink wine colors, people buy more Twinkies but fewer cartons of Tropicana orange juice, and makes water drinkers choose Vitaminwater over more heavily advertised competitors. It helps make Steve Jobs worth $5 billion.
And it certainly seems to prove that this is the Age of the Eye.