American - Writer | January 14, 1960 -
We've gone from a world in which Starbucks set a cutting-edge standard for mass-market design to a world in which Starbucks establishes the bare minimum. If your establishment can't come up with an original look, customers expect at least some sleek wood fixtures, nicely upholstered chairs, and faux-Murano glass pendant lights.
Virginia Postrel
WorldDesignLookLightsGlassWood
When Baby Boomer women started choosing hotel-like birthing centers over hospital delivery rooms, hospitals quickly wised up. Now even rural hospitals offer well-designed labor-delivery-recovery suites.
WomenBabyNowOverHospitalUp
Unlike painting, sculpture, or music, typefaces must be useful to someone. Fortunately for designers, the digital age has produced new problems to solve - developing typefaces that work on mobile phones, for one - and enabled better solutions to old problems.
WorkMusicAgePaintingBetterNew
The profusion of fonts is one more product of the digital revolution. Beginning in the mid-'80s and accelerating in the 1990s, type design weathered the sort of radical, technology-driven transformation that other creative industries, including music, publishing, and movies, now face.
MusicBeginningCreativeFaceDesign
At the basic consumer level, the profusion of fonts appeals to a culture that celebrates expressive individualism.
CultureLevelIndividualismBasic
Though designed as a mere convenience, clothing sizes establish an unintended norm, an ideal from which deviations seem like flaws. There's nothing like a trip to the dressing room to convince a woman - fat, thin, or in between - that she's a freak.
WomanFatFlawsNothingSheRoom
Standardized sizes made inexpensive, off-the-rack garments economically feasible. They gave shoppers a reliable guide to finding clothes in self-service shops.
ClothesFindingStandardizedReliable
Clothing creates the illusion that bodies fit an aesthetically pleasing norm. And that illusion depends on getting the fit right. Garments that bunch, pull, or sag call attention to figure flaws and often make people look worse than they would without clothes.
PeopleClothesAttentionLookFlaws
Fit experts envision a future in which you'd carry your body scan in your cell phone or on a thumb drive, using the data to order clothes online or find them in stores. But who's going to pay for all those scanners, which cost about $35,000 each, and the staff to run them?
FutureCell PhoneDriveDataClothes
The mobile middle class gravitates to the cities where housing is affordable.
ClassHousingWhereMobileMiddle
Some of the higher price of L.A. real estate does reflect the intrinsic pleasure of living there, as I'm reminded every time I walk out my door into the perfect weather.
TimeWalkDoorReal EstateWeather
Even before Sputnik, scientists and policy makers worried that not enough Americans were studying science.
ScienceEnoughStudyingPolicyEven
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