Unseen Things

The rain drizzled most of the day in New York City on Sunday. It was the kind of day you wanted to be inside, warm and dry. Many of us NYC girls were eagerly awaiting the season premiere of “Sex and the City” so the television got turned on early in my house. As I channel surfed, I saw a brief sound bite of something about animals on 60 Minutes and decided to keep it there, while I waited for Sarah Jessica Parker’s arrival. I am glad I did.

Turned out one of the segments was on Harvard University Design Professor John R. Stilgoe, author of Outside Lies Magic: Regaining History and Awareness in Everyday Places. Stilgoe believes that the majority of Harvard students, (and the rest of the population, for that matter) are visually illiterate. That most people lack a sense of visual spontaneity. The reason? Stilgoe states that once people learn to read, they stop looking around. In his book, Stilgoe provides a history of the American landscape: he dissects our visual surroundings and his observations will challenge the way you see electrical grids, manhole covers and fire hydrants (and how they both have evolved graphically over the last one hundred years—this in and of itself is a wonderful history lesson in iron welding), fences, abandoned railroads, vacant lots, front lawns, and trolley pulls. He waxes sentimental over the beauty of a small mass of brass doorbells outside the door of a dilapidated building…some with names, some without. It was all very poignant and necessary…seeing the things that we don’t see but could and should.

Then it got a bit disturbing.

Stilgoe started talking about all the things we don’t see in marketing. First he told of the (now famous) example of the hidden arrow in the Fedex logo, then he showed a scary example of American Express sending out identical magazines with different covers, one targeted to men (happy man with pretty girl on his arm) and one targeted to women (woman with horse, men behind a fence). Then he revealed one that startled me. Apparently, if you take a “duck walk” (the level that kids see) down the cereal aisle in any supermarket in the world, you will notice that all the eyes of the cereal characters (Snap, Crackle and Pop, Capt’n Crunch, Tony the Tiger, etc) are all looking down, to make eye contact with the children. Apparently, “this is to create an emotional bond early on that will stay with the kids throughout their lives.”

So it got me thinking…what else is out there that we see but don’t see? Have you ever been asked to minimize or maximize something more “subliminal” in a design piece? Are you aware of other hidden messages that have happened by accident, like the FedEx logo arrow? And last but not least…if you slow down a minute today, and move more deliberately, can you see anything that you haven’t seen before?