The Tao of design

Both collections also offer access to a flexible keyword search and the"Lightbox" - a personal album which allows surfers to create their own sets of favorite works, make personal notes about individual items, and share choices through slide shows. Icons at the top of the screen allow backtracking to previous pages, and this is recommended over using your browser's Back button. While the latter usually works, it can (with this Flash-based content) lead to unpredictable results - for example, going directly from an enlarged image back to the grid or timeline, and skipping the item's home page in between.

Unfortunately, a quirky Back button wasn't the site's only idiosyncrasy.

In an 800x600 browser window, text links at the bottom of the home page sit on top of introductory text, making both illegible. The site also seemed to need occasional poking and prodding to get it to work. In Explorer, I had to 'prompt' the loading of the home page's main content (even after th eFlash components were apparently loaded) by clicking on the Archive's homepage icon, and some thumbnails in the 2004 'timeline' never loaded at all -displaying a rotating arrow 'progress' icon until I gave up and moved on. In Netscape, the full archives had serious problems with loading thumbnail grids until after I had chosen a specific category (after which the system worked fine regardless of settings).

More aggravations than you'll find on most sites reviewed in this space, but with luck you might not encounter them yourself, and if you have even a passing interest in the material, the content will compensate for any irritation. From a redesign of the Comedy Central network logo, to the cover design for the 2001 Charles Schultz retrospective, "Peanuts," to packaging for everything from iPods to Star Wars merchandise, this site will be a valuable resource for the student of design - and for the rest of us, an entertaining spot to do a bit of poking around.

Further design appreciation and awareness can also be cultivated from a very different -and potentially much more frustrating- source. (But in this case, the frustration is intended.) The Retail Alphabet Game presents players with a completely unremarkable collection of 26 letters -unremarkable except that each letter has been lifted from the wordmark of a well known company or product. Many, if not most, will look instantly familiar but the question is, can you recognize the letters' origins when they're taken out of their context. (Could you recognize the "o" from the Coca-Cola logo?)

Below the grid, each letter is assigned a text window into which the surfer can type his or her guesses, and a click of the "Try" button will reveal which guesses were right. (Incorrect entries will be blanked out for subsequent attempts.) There are four sets of alphabets currently available,and if you just have to know the origins of some particularly frustrating characters, answers are available for the first three editions. As to the most recent, in the words of creator, Joey Katzen, "Requests for hints will not be addressed."

If you're prone to hair pulling, you might want to put on a hat before accepting this challenge. While some letters will be easily recognizable and others complete mysteries, the truly maddening examples will be those that you know that you know but just can't put your finger on. Of course, if you can instantly produce the correct parents for every orphaned letter, you'll have to decide for yourself whether this is due to your astounding observational powers, or a mind fully commandeered by Madison Avenue.

The AIGA Design Archives can be found at http://designarchives.aiga.org/ with the Retail Alphabet Game at http://www.joeykatzen.com/alpha/.

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