“In any other country, Milton Glaser would have been knighted by now,” said Steven Heller about the legendary designer recently. The implication: Americans don’t care about design as much as people in other countries.

A recent email conversation touched on the same nerve…

“I don’t think they could have made it any uglier if they had tried—even if they were trying really, really hard to make it ugly.”

That’s what ex-37signaller and now Nike employee Ernest Kim wrote in a note to a few of us about the 2010 Accord Crosstour (shown here). Looks like others agree with him too.

Ernest wonders why the cars Honda designs for markets outside the U.S. look better than the ones designed specifically for the American market. Could it be that Americans just have bad taste?

The sad part to me is that Honda cars designed for markets outside of the U.S. generally look at least decent (examples being the Fit, Euro/Japan Accord (aka the Acura TSX here in the States), S2000), but the ones specifically for U.S. consumption are horrendous (examples being this awful Crosstour, the Pilot SUV and Ridgeline pick-up). One reason might simply be that their U.S.-based design team is not very good, but I suspect it has more to do with U.S.-based focus groups and lowered standards for U.S. focused products, which is the approach that led to GM’s eventual bankruptcy. I know it’s the trendy thing to do to say that Americans, on the whole, have bad taste, but I really believe it’s true. A product that’s just good enough to be wildly popular in the U.S. typically doesn’t make the cut anywhere. I have to wonder why our standards seem to be so much lower? Having traveled to Europe and Asia, I don’t think the average European or Asian person is any smarter than the average American, but their standards for product design seem appreciably higher. Is it because people outside the U.S. tend to buy fewer items and so have higher expectations for those items? Or some other cultural influence that they have and we don’t? What do you guys think?