Hard cases make bad law. – Legal adage

When I go to a local bottle shop or brewery these days, one of the pleasures I take is in admiring the artwork on the cans and bottles. There’s a wonderful range of styles and designs, and the bottle shop fridges and shelves are like an art gallery. Afterwards, pouring out the can or bottle into a glass at home gives me another moment to appreciate the aesthetic quality of the packaging. I was doing so the other day, and I thought to myself not only it was a nice label but that this was in fact what a label should be.

In today’s consumer goods world this was actually a very unusual experience to have. The label in question contained comparatively little information: the name of the producer; the town and address of the producer; the name of the product; a brief description of the product, limited to the beer style and the names of a couple of its notable ingredients; and the quantity and alcoholic content. Most of the label had no text at all but was rather an image designed to convey, visually, the tenor of the beer. The label simply told the essential information that a reasonable consumer would want to know, and then communicated something of the character of the product and the brewers behind it. I was duly informed and intrigued.

Later that evening, I was brushing my teeth, and I was struck by the contrast with my tube of toothpaste. Small text in various formats covered every inch of the tube, containing information that neither I nor, I was confident, the vast majority of consumers would have any interest in. It contained empty slogans, vague warnings, and contact information, and it certainly wasn’t interesting to look at. As a label, it was a failure. Much of its content was doubtless due to various regulations that mandated all sorts of things on the labels of toothpastes. It made me consider, though, how it’s possible for a thing to stray from its original purpose. At some point, presumably, this label was supposed to be a label of the sort on the beer can.

The various elements of this toothpaste label might have been introduced with sensible intentions, such as responding to consumer questions or shielding the manufacturer from legal liability. Each design feature likely covered some contingency that seemed worth addressing. I imagined them getting added, one by one, gradually filling up all the space. It’s easy to think that you’re improving a thing by introducing new elements to address previously ignored possibilities. Often, however, you’re just obscuring the original purpose, and after a while you’re left with something that seems well-developed in its complexity but in practice no longer serves its most basic functions.

Focusing on contingencies is often misguided. The main purpose is no longer the focus. What results – whether it’s a label, or an instruction manual, or a physical arrangement of objects – ironically makes realizing the main purpose full of friction. Now, in the normal use case, which accounts for virtually all encounters with the thing, you’re left with a vastly diminished experience, full of confusion and frustration. The shift often happens gradually, and so you don’t realize how much you’re straying. It then takes the experience of a clean, simple, beautiful thing to remind you what the intention was in the first place.