A great example of bad design disguised as good design. Yes, these little bottles are pretty, with the bold, gray font. These are some of the products set out at a Holiday Inn Express.

But - how do you wash your hands? The first purpose of package design should be to hold the stuff. The second purpose should be to let people understand what’s in the package. This packaging system fails miserably on count two! Yes, they’re quite pretty, but how would someone know if they want to wash or scrub or cleanse? You need to read tiny type on the back to know that “wash” is for your hair, “scrub” is for your bath, and “cleanse” is for your hands. How hard would it to be to call them shampoo, bath gel, and soap, and avoid the need to translate the names elsewhere on the package?

This is a great example of designers getting caught up in the gimmick of the naming convention (in this case using a verb instead of a noun) and losing sight of the goal.

At 50 you’re looking better than ever! How can we honor you on this anniversary of a national tragedy and an even older dream?

We had a great time in London and Madrid! Would you like to see some photos ?

Hey, proposal team - this one is for us! How important is editing? Seth Godin tells us that for the past 27 years, every movie that has won the Best Picture Oscar has also been nominated for best editing.

Seth’s Blog: Editors

My nephew Adam wants to start a blog, and I’m showing him how it works!

Check it out here - http://www.adamvertising.blogspot.com/

And they only needed to get two pages right!

“For Want of a Proofreader, or at Least a Good One, a Reading Exam Is Lost” - New York Times Nov. 20, 2007

Amazing - I got a wonderful response from Victoria’s Secret’s Internet Services & Correspondence Manager! He clearly read my comments, understood and responded to my specific complaints. He apologized, gave me the rest of the credit to my account, and also gave me a generous gift card! Most important, the letter felt sincere and personal, not a random form letter. Of course I’ll give them another chance!

Rob Forbes, the founder, left Design Within Reach and started his blog about good design, StudioForbes.

Someone else has apparently taken over writing for DWR. Their cool new holiday gift line has a category they call “Future People” - I guess to them the point a child becomes a person is somewhere in their 20s or so. I don’t know about you, but even as an old person without children I find this very offensive.

I was looking over the featured stationary products. They offer the Rhodia Essential Box (pads of note paper in a box, $20). Might be nice, but here’s how they describe the included pencil - “… two Rhodia pencils that are triangulated so they won’t roll away.” Triangulate means divide or form into triangles. They meant triangular - shaped like a triangle.

This isn’t so hard - most of us learned about triangles back when we were still future grown-ups.

. . . We want to feel good about the companies we do business with. If you Google “bad service Victoria’s Secret” you’ll get more than half a million hits. Makes my experience pretty unenventful.

I sent this letter to Victoria’s Secret on September 14, and as of 11 days later I got no response. On Sept 13 I cancelled the order, and should have gotten a refund. I got a partial refund to my credit card on 9/17, which I can’t quite figure out. Maybe they still wanted to charge me shipping that never happened, but I can’t get the figures to work out.

Today I got a partial shipment of my order. Of course it’s going back.

The most amazing part of this transaction: No one ever asked what I wanted to add to my original order. I was going to order a new, expensive product that they have been promoting very heavily. What a waste of a good advertising budget! They could have said simply offered to ship it for free even though it wouldn’t be conisdered part of the same order, and all would have been well.

* * *

September 14, 2007

Dear Ms. Turney,

I had the most astonishing customer service experience yesterday, and thought you would like to know about it. As a business owner, I always want my customers to share their experiences with me.

Yesterday afternoon I had been a happy Victoria’s Secret customer for as long as I can remember. I had an order pending, waiting for your warehouse move to ship out. When I got my catalogue in the mail, I saw a product I liked and decided to order it. I figured I could add it to my pending order and save the extra shipping cost.

This is exactly what I want when I send out promotions for my business, and I would welcome a customer wanting to increase their business with me with open arms. However, my experience with Victoria’s Secret was quite the opposite.

When I called to add the new product, the first customer service representative told me that was impossible because the order was closed. Upon further clarification, she told me that meant it had already been charged to my credit card. She didn’t know when it would ship, but I had already been charged. I was requesting that she credit it back to my account until the order was being processed for shipping. At this time, the phone went dead. I don’t know for sure that she hung up on me – my cell phone might have dropped the call; that is quite possible. But they do make a big deal about confirming contact information and she did not call me back.

I called again and this time asked for a supervisor. After she finally came on the phone, after a 10 – 15 minute hold, she was more concerned about confirming my email address for “security purposes” than about why I needed higher level assistance. Obviously, an email address is the least secure information you can have about someone and is by no stretch of the imagination a way to confirm a person’s identity. No one knows what I ordered from you, but thousands of people know my email address. Well, this poor girl thought her main job was to make sure the email address she had on file was correct, not to resolve a problem for an unhappy customer.

Finally, after threatening to remove my email from the system (some threat!), she would allow me to tell her what the problem was. If you think I’ve spent a whole page of this letter on irrelevant background information, you’ll know how I was feeling when she finally said something along the lines of “how can I help you.”

I placed an order on-line on Sept 4, and I was notified that there would be a delay in shipping because the warehouse was moving. I don’t mind that, and appreciate being notified. What I do object to is your company processing the bill through my credit card company. The charge came through on my account on September 6, and as of September 13 they still don’t know when the order will ship. As of today, you have had unauthorized use of my money for more than a week.

The floor supervisor also told me that your company had to go ahead and charge the accounts 7 – 10 days before orders go out because Victoria’s Secret would lose “billions” of dollars because people give bad credit card numbers. I have a merchant account, and know that this is not true. It is very simple to verify a credit card and get an authorization and hold on a charge without actually putting the charge through. It’s not hard; hotels and other merchants do it every day.

I believe the entire on-line merchant community charges for merchandise as it is shipped. I did not authorize Victoria’s Secret to help themselves to my money without shipping my order. I understand that you want to keep revenue coming in during this transition, but I think that’s a very unethical business procedure. The cost of your move, and related downtime, is your cost of doing business. I am unwilling to bear that cost for you.

I don’t blame the person I talked to. I really do believe she was reading the script she was given, and she was perfectly polite. I do blame whoever gave her the script that was so obviously full of “mis-information” and whoever decided to pursue such unethical policies.

I was a happy customer wanting to do more business with you when I picked up the phone yesterday. Now, I feel that I might never do business with you again.

Kim Schlossberg Designs is five years old today! I just might (probably) be a little too emotional to properly thank everyone tonight at the celebration, so let me get it out of my system now.

I’ve made it through five years, and have never gone hungry. In fact, these last couple years I’ve had really strong growth. And the only reason this has been possible is because of the help and support of my friends and family.

All of our work comes from referrals. Thank you to all the friends who keep sending me new business.

My print jobs turn out great and my clients are happy because of the hard work of my printers. So, to quote one of my earliest clients: thank you for making me look good.

My web sites are working well, and looking better than I expected, and coming in on time, thanks to the help of a wonderful web developer. Thank you, too, for making me look good.

We can take on any size job without getting overwhelmed because of the talents and extraordinary hard work of my team. Thank you for going the extra hundreds of miles and for caring about our clients as much as I do.

My many designer and artist friends have never been competition, but collaborators. Thank you for the work we do together, and also for your generous help brainstorming designs. And a special thanks to I think every designer I know who contributed to our new logo design.

Thank you to my fellow business owners who shared your experience, strength and hope to help me through so many expected and unexpected “learning experiences.”

Thank you to all my friends from Arthur Andersen who helped me to see there was a light at the end of the tunnel for all of us, and for continuing to make my life better.

Thank you to all my friends from Toastmasters, NAWBO, and the AMA for teaching me to say hello to strangers.

So many of my clients are really working to make this world a better place for all of us. Thank you for letting me contribute in my own little way.

Thank you to Walter for looking over every word I’ve written and every design I sent to a client. For helping with so many web sites. For reviewing every contract and agreement. For writing some very effective letters. And more than that, for giving me support and encouragement to have bigger dreams and to go after them.

And thank you to all of you for your belief in me.