H-mart, a grocery store chain featuring huge square footage and Korean and East Asian imported foodstuffs has opened a store nearby. Here are some of the designs for past promotional material. I love their use of bold colors and the slightly “in-your-face” composition style. A nice example of visual grammar in action:  you don’t need to understand the language to understand that their brand stands for fresh, clean and healthy food as well as greeters with oversize Micky Mouse gloves.

The Massachusetts DMV has a problem with red ink.( I cannot be the first person to have made this bad joke). See the picture below? On the left is a Massachusetts inspection sticker from January 2009, on the right is another Mass inspection sticker from 6 months later. Looks like someone went with the lowest bid from the printer. Wonder what law enforcement thinks of this? There must be thousands of stickers on the road with colors ranging from white to pink to red.

Update: Local Fox News did a report on this several weeks ago. Of all organizations, I can’t believe Fox didn’t go with the “red ink” – “DMV” pun. C’mon people, do I have to do your pandering for you?

Package design, while not my expertise, has always been of interest to me. For example, I followed for days, with fascination, the disaster that was the Tropicana orange juice redesign a few months ago. While nowhere near that level, I did find myself standing in the supermarket aisle the other day scrutinizing this new label from Stonyfield Farms. The type, imagery and colors are all very pleasant, but it took me longer than I would have liked to confirm, that this was indeed yogurt. (The container top was no help either).

Click image to enlarge.

With few exceptions, the design of most automobiles has hit a dead end for quite a while. I have a theory that the best and brightest designers in the automobile industry have funnelled all of their creativity and passion into designing car taillights. Tracing the design and evolution of these innovative taillights could make a great book or at least a New Yorker article. I’m available for the right price, BTW.