I’m actually a fan of these plastic storage totes. They keep the mice and bugs out of your Christmas decorations, keep clay wet for quite a while and are stronger and easier to move around than cardboard boxes. Isn’t it a tell-tale sign of a consumer culture, however, when they’re put on prominent display and on sale immediately after Christmas?

Cameraphone capture while shopping for lumber for a work surface for a Christmas gift

It is even Christmas in China these days. And while we continue to complain here in the West about the commercialization of the season, it is exactly this commercial aspect of Christmas that is allowing missionaries and others to explain the real meaning of the holiday. An interesting turn of events, don’t you think?

Sculpture from lead pencil studio, Non-sign ii, via Design-Realized

The local Best Buy is selling joy

Our brief and unfinished discussions have largely attempted to define the idea of joy, moving from there to examine how it might be achieved. The idea of joy to us is more deeply seated than happiness. Happiness is fleeting and unreliable. Joy is something that has to be worked at, but once attained it persists. Other emotions may step in front of it during life — grief at the death of a friend, worry at the loss of a job, happiness while watching the sun set — but joy will remain and resurface, as well as provide a foundation for the rest of a person’s outlook on life.

Before beginning this little entry I did some research on what other people thought of joy. I was surprised to see how closely dictionaries (and Wikipedia) aligned both joy and happiness. They call joy an emotion, which doesn’t make sense to me. So far as I can tell, joy is a choice that becomes part of a person’s worldview through consistent application. It is not an emotion. (Or, maybe joy is an emotion, but there is something else that we’re reaching for and don’t have a better word for. So we call it “joy.”)

In this research I did find a few less-than-academic articles trying to make the distinction between the two clearer, but they fall flat. The best bit I found supporting our own sentiment was a G.K. Chesterton quote:

Pessimism is at best an emotional half-holiday; joy is the uproarious labour by which all things live.

Keyword “labour.”

Electronic toys do not result in joy, they just don’t. A lot of other things can they cause — a failure in interpersonal communication, obesity, debt — which might include happiness, a temporary happiness. A new iPhone will undoubtedly come out next year. The successor to Blu-Ray is certainly being developed already, just as Blu-Ray takes off. Happiness from such things will be fleeting.

To be fair, some of the things such big box retailers purvey may facilitate joy. A new stove could facilitate the crafting of new edible family traditions around the holidays, or all year round. A new CD — given music’s enigmatic ability to get into our heads — could also lend itself to joy. However, I still don’t like this Christmas marketing campaign or its implications. At best it plays on people’s misunderstanding of joy (based on our observations of the word’s connotations). At worst it suggests a lackluster definition of the idea of joy without suggesting a semantic replacement for a deeper happiness, a contentment.

Adding: After a little more digging, this time into the concordance, I found the Greek word Chara (pronounced khar-ah’) which is translated as “joy.” It’s defined as “cheerfulness, i.e. calm delight.” I like the word calm there, although I’m not sure how it contributes to my thoughts above.

I’ve been thinking the past few years about this kind of thing [design theft] in graphic design — I may have mentioned so on the blog before — since that’s where I spend a lot of my hours. Every so often I hear about a startup’s design, almost always a logo, being contested by some existing business for infringement. One such incident, from three years ago or so, involved Red Hat’s Fedora Project and a startup who unwittingly incorporated the universal symbol for infinity in their brand new branding. Fedora also uses the infinity symbol.

Thing is, a lot of these cases aren’t blatant copying (the copying problem seems to be more prevalent in contest entries from what I’ve read). The aforementioned startup’s new identity was not copying Fedora’s icon.

There are only so many shapes that comprise simple designs, which is good logo design, and only so many different configurations for said shapes. I don’t know what the solution to these kinds of run-ins is. I’m just making observations at this point, although I will decry any overly eager litigious reactions, which are unfortunately almost inevitable in this country.

Now, looking at the Wolfie and the Sneak post, I’m wondering how often the same kind of entirely incidental copying — which isn’t the right word since its not intentional — happens in other realms of design for the same reason (I will note, however, that it’s pretty clear Cody Foster & Co, highlighted in the Wolfie and the Sneak’s post, is blatantly ripping things off.). The first example in the post reminds me immediately of a sea urchin, as it would do for a lot of people. Aren’t such observations from nature available to any creative person who wants to riff on them? It’s easy for me to see how two people, one on the East Coast and one on the West, were both inspired after observing an urchin to craft a clay candle holder that emulates the spines of said urchin. Should one be punished, so-to-speak, because they were the second person to have the idea? Even if they are, say, just a teenager when the first one finds such inspiration?

How many of these occurrences went unnoticed pre-internet? Or pre-telegraph? Or pre-printing press?

Of course, now the real fun begins as people start to argue, again, against the BCS. Their are five undefeated teams at the end of this regular season all of whom have a hankering to play for a national title. The bowl system doesn’t allow for that. We need a playoff many people will argue. Apparently the weight of congress is being thrown around in the discussion more and more this year.

I understand why every undefeated team wants a shot at an undisputed title, but as a spectator I don’t think it’s that big of deal. I’m no expert on the system, but I can’t help thinking that if there weren’t so much money involved in college football these days it would be less of a debate.

While I retain a certain nostalgia for “the good old days” of college ball, I know those days have, sadly, passed. The games are still great to watch, but the system has become more about business than athletics from what I can see in my living room. It seems like everything in the game now has a dollar sign attached to it.

The one exception, the last vestige of a less commercialized sport other than the players, are the bowls. I’m not saying my observation is entirely accurate (sponsorships have been around, well, probably for more than a century), but it is my observation.

So for me the bowls are representative of a purer, so to speak, sport. I know tournaments and brackets are the only fair way to give all of the deserving teams a shot at an undisputed title, but in a culture already so ubiquitously engulfed by sponsorships and advertisements — where the dollar plays the puppeteer in so many aspects of our lives — I like my college bowls (even though the inception of the BCS also took away some of their luster). They help the sport retain a little bit of its athletic glory (think Olympics).

Suh for Heisman
On an unrelated note, here’s my plug for Suh for the Heisman Trophy. The voters need to be able to look beyond the offense and the ball carriers in the game. They are supposedly voting for “the Most Outstanding Player in the United States in 2009,” and defensive players are usually overlooked. Sports Illustrated’s Andy Staples puts it this way: ” . . . unfortunately, the majority of the 926 voters don’t understand the game well enough to vote for a defensive tackle. They only watch the ball, so they almost always elect a quarterback, a running back or a wide receiver who also returns kicks. Suh, double-teamed almost every down, affected every offensive play Texas ran.”

Living life outside the reach of American advertising, for example, was much more serene. It was also freeing since I had space to ponder things beyond how my abs look, the kind of car I drive or the clothes I wear. In fact, I’d been living in areas where many people wear the same clothing almost every day—without their friends (or Stacy London) staging an intervention.

So reentering our consumer-driven, image-mindful country felt like jumping naked into a glacial lake. (Well, at least my shock and audible gasping were probably pretty similar.) I came home to American friends who were ashamed to carry the same attractive, perfectly useful purse for more than a few months — forget about wearing a sweater twice in one week.

As terrible as it may sound, during my first days back I wanted to smack several people and yell, “Get over yourselves!” Instead, you’ll be relieved to know I bit my tongue and tried to smile a lot . . .

But in parts of the Third World with few resources and even less income, I have watched boys play with Coca-Cola bottles for an entire hour. And they didn’t feel at all deprived. Resourceful to the core, they could have fun and be creative with lots of things we wouldn’t even consider in the West.

This dichotomy was probably a very intentional part of the company’s original branding scheme, for whatever reason. Even with this knowledge, however, the mismatch still bothers me — which very well may have been their reasoning.

Running to the post office today I spotted a Yellow truck sporting a new logo. This newer, slightly Web 2.0 esque design actually bears a tinge of yellow running through its core.

I must admit that, yellow or orange or both, I approve of this new incarnation of the company’s identity. Alas, it’s apparently not going to last that long. “The trucks and trailers for Akron-based Roadway and Yellow Transportation will soon sport a new, supplemental logo: YRC. And at some point — the parent company won’t say when — the Roadway and Yellow names will be replaced by YRC,” according to Ohio.com. The following image from the Under Consideration blog places Yellow, Roadway and YRC logos next to each other.

I’m not really feeling the new YRC logo; it’s trying to do too much, and the type seems unintentionally askew. I will be, in fact, sad to see the Yellow brand disappear. For whatever twisted reason, it’s been a part of my personal visual iconography since childhood.

Just for kicks, here’s a photo of the old Yellow logo from ToastyKen’s Flickr photostream.

NPR cites new research suggesting reds are better for detail oriented tasks such as proofreading while blues are better for creative tasks. Color theory always fascinates me.

[YouTube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_F2md4uGmMU]

My wife has actually expressed interest in a new Dyson. Is a Dyson better than a “dual bag?” The video also reminds me of a man I know who cannot bring himself to buy impractical gifts for his wife. Poor guy.

Saatchi & Saatchi did the video. Visit the campaign’s website here. There is an amusing and institutional audio loop on the website that goes through things wives wish their husbands would or wouldn’t do. Some of them are kind of funny, such as “Stop checking out other women in restaurants” and “Express your feelings.” There is also “Talk more, but don’t interrupt” followed by “Speak less.” Um, which is it?

There’s nothing food-like whatsoever about that name, real or implicit. It’s probably not the first time it’s been done, but have marketers (I’m one of them) no shame? This is positively absurd. If you must squeeze every dollar out of impressionable teenagers at least do it with some grace. At least act like you’ve tried to apply some elegance to your greed.

And on a completely different note, the phenom that has been High School Musical is interesting. When I was the age of the kids who’ve been eating this new series up, anyone who admitted to watching a musical would have been laughed out of the high school building. Personally, I’m not a big fan even as an adult, sans any juvenile peer pressure. I do like The Sound of Music and Fiddler on the Roof. Mama Mia was actually pretty good once I realized it was supposed to be melodramatic (although there were two or three completely superfluous numbers that significantly weakened the overall impression).

I know some people disagree with me strongly on this point (my wife, for one), but creating a movie — or play for that matter — where people so randomly break into song and choreography is hard to stomach. I don’t need everything in my film and literature to relate to something realistic, but a lot of musicals just seem off to me. Good stories ruined by random musical interjection.