Let me help you

This came with some online shopping I ordered from Marks & Spencer. It says 'Hey, I'm important' twice - once verbally and once visually. But the inside of the leaflet was disappointing - a bureaucratic form in small type.

It's a bit like someone spotting you're in trouble and saying 'I'll help' in a very loud voice, but not actually helping much.

A helpful, on-brand, slightly wacky (in an Innocent smoothie kind of way) headline is almost invariably followed by a spectacular failure to solve the problem. Have you ever noticed that the larger the headline saying 'The small print' the smaller the print actually is?

   

That's what I call personalisation

How did Tesco know that's how I was feeling that day? 

 

Icon grammar

 

Double negatives are controversial. Pedants may think that 'I didn't do nothing' means 'I did it', but we all know the second negative is an intensifier.

So hopefully this doesn't come across as 'Don't use the litter bin'. But risky.

Fair comment

Public signs should include a comments section, or in this case some FAQs to explain why this road is closed but no work is happening (Margate again). 

 

Which? best buys: I don't buy this format

Which? the consumer testing magazine and website, can be remarkably dense sometimes. We were looking at food mixers and Kenwood have done brilliantly in bagging the top four Best Buy slots.

Well done, Kenwood. The red one was best, then the white one, then the cream-coloured one, then the black one. Yes, they are the same mixer in different colours. 

Assuming they don't actually test the different colours separately, I reckon this is an information design problem. This format doesn't allow them to do the sensible thing and present this as one product with colour variants.

They could just call it the 'Kenwood KMix KMX754...', and the next column could list the colour variants.

The strange websites of thought leaders

My mention of Robert de Beaugrande's website reminds me of some others I've encountered from prominent thinkers where there's a strange disconnect between the quality of the thinking and the visual design.

Here's a page from the website of Christopher Alexander, something of a hero of mine for his work on pattern languages. Perhaps I'm reacting like a modernist architect might to some of the vernacular structures he celebrates... I'll have to ponder that one.