Everyday Design: Environment Inspiration

I took three picture and a screen capture of things that I see every day.  Let's get the poor ones out of the way first.

Bad: Martin Professional Cleaning and Restoration logo

Something bad was done here.

This sits on the refrigerator in my house currently.  I believe the target audience would be their customers (people getting their carpet cleaned).  As you can see from the photo, something is very off in the resolution of the photo.  From my guess, it all boils down to not using the right resolution for the logo to print correctly.  This causes everything in the logo to be off.  They type is blurry and nearly illegible, the type gets a weird pink color to it when it clearly wants to be red, and it becomes pixelated just making it bad to look at.  The design of the logo itself isn't poor but since it was not properly printed, the outcome looks bad.

Ugly: The Morning Sun Website

Behold the horror...

I took this screen capture with my two monitor set up in my room.  I absolutely abhor this website.  I check it periodically so I can keep tabs on how kids I coach in track at Colgan are doing in football this year.  Even though I visit the site frequently enough that I should be able to navigate it, I am always amazed at how I can't find what I want and just the overall clutter of the site.  I took the biggest picture I could, but it still does not properly show how silly the front page is.  Top headlines, Sports, Blogs, Entertainment, News, Photos, Videos, and Business & Personal Finance are all headlines on the front page.  It makes everything on the front page just look cluttered.  They could easily put these things on separate pages to do away with the clutter.  There are even tabs included at the top in order to navigate to an entertainment or sports section so the need for these things on the front page is superfluous.
There are also big blank boxes of trapped white space which is a big layout sin.  The logo is fine at the top and prominent.  The confusing website design doesn't help the target audience (basically people of Crawford county, specifically older people who care about the news) navigate the website because I doubt the audience is that technologically adept in the first place.  As a technical writer, this website makes me want to yell.

Now for happier discoveries.

Good: Winnie the Pooh poster

A nostalgia punch in the gut.

 This is a poster that hangs in my room and I absolutely love it.  Winnie the Pooh was one of my favorite movies of the last year.There really is no logo or much type to be talked about (what type is there works perfectly fine), but what is here features great simplicity in design.
The colors for all of the characters pop against the white background and the yellow honey serves as Pooh's signature snack of choice and great white space.  The big amount of white space used with the honey makes the date prominent at the bottom which is easily legible with the simple type used.  This poster is basically a call to action to see Winnie the Pooh on July 15.  The year wouldn't need to be included because the poster would only be there for the time of the movie being in theaters.  The target audience I can think of is two: the kids who want to see what these adorable adventurers are up to and adults who want a huge nostalgia trip.  The printing process must have gone fine also because the poster is crisp and looks wonderful.

Great: Bawls bottle

It is a thing of beauty.

This is a bottle that sits in my room.  Once you get past the comical effect of saying something like "I'm just sitting here drinking some Bawls," you find that the design of the bottle is absolutely great and memorable.  The type is prominent with the white against the blue bottle and easily legible.  The target audience is gamers actually, but you wouldn't really be able to tell that from the bottle.  Bawls is an energy drink company that will sponsor things like LAN parties by sending you free cases of Bawls as long as you send in pics of your group playing games and drinking Bawls.  The call to action of a bottle containing a drink is to drink the contents.  What makes this bottle standout is the design.  The bottle has a unique color and grip to it.  You don't see many glass bottled energy drinks and I have never seen a bumpy bottle like this.  It gives a certain classiness to the Bawls drinking gamer over other energy drink brands.  I have to believe that the production process of everything here went fine because all the type is legible.