Category Archives: Great Design

Great Design

“Old Fashioned” Health Care By Elvis?

I drive by this billboard often.  I’ll tell you what my gut reaction was the first time I saw it.  To be completely honest, I thought the owners of this company were totally insane.

But as time went on, I realized I was actually warming up to it for some reason.  I just couldn’t figure out why!  On the surface, this is a zany billboard advertising some kind of health care service that is somehow old fashioned, and as far as I can tell, one of the proprietors is dressed up like Elvis.  How could this possibly work?

I now believe it is successful on multiple levels.

The first level is simply that people are used to medical experiences that are cold, sterile, and even painful.  In contrast, Vicki and Chad aren’t wearing suits or hospital gear, and they have genuine smiles on their faces.  This might be low-tech,  but it works.  I honestly believe they care.  The color scheme, especially the pink, also works to this effect.  It feels welcoming.  Maybe they could achieve the same effect without the 1950s Elvis theme, but this very theme imbues them with it the most, which leads me to the second level.

The second level is something deeper and much more complex.  I believe people, deep down, yearn for “Golden Eras”.  Even if they consciously know that these eras were sometimes barely different from any other, the eras still possess some intangible magic.  Whether it’s Augustan Rome or the post-World War II United States, the mere concept of these individual periods automatically convey a number of emotions and ideas.  And while I can’t possibly list them all, near the top of the list we would surely find stability, prosperity, and that classic trait, quality.  So, I believe the message of Elvis and old fashioned has probably triggered some kind of (most likely subconscious) switch in my mind anchored to the popular concept of the post-World War II U.S., circa 1950s.  As a result, I have a newfound affinity for this business.

The good ol' days?
The good ol’ days?

The third level is that it’s out of the ordinary.  Therefore I remember it, which of course is the major goal of advertising.

Just as a basic disclaimer, I have absolutely no affiliation with Vicki Roy Home Health Care, nor have I heard of any reports or reviews of their service.  I’ve simply come to the conclusion that their marketing is well done.

Great Design

New To Me: In Gmail, Folders Are Labels And Labels Are Folders

This definitively solves a general problem I had been wanting to find a solution to for quite some time.  The solution is extremely simple, and kudos to whoever put it together.  (I don’t know if Gmail was the first to solve this and I almost assume they weren’t.  They’re just the first ones I’ve happened to see using it.)

The problem is what to do when you want a folder system to organize your information hierarchically, and you also want a tagging/labeling system so that each piece of information can also have multiple descriptors assigned to it, but you don’t want to keep the two systems in sync manually.  The solution is to treat folders as labels and vice versa.  The big implication is that if you apply multiple labels to a piece of information, that piece of information then exists in multiple folders.   If you delete it from one of those folders, the corresponding label is also removed.

Gmail folders are labels