America’s First Brand Touchpoint

A couple weekends ago, my wife and I took a trip northward to Canada (aka “America’s Hat”), specifically Vancouver, B.C. The trip was great – what an amazing, global-feeling city. I heard more languages spoken on the street in 10 minutes there than I have in the past 10 days in Portland. We had some amazing nouveau Indian cuisine, some excellent, forget-everything-you-thought-you-knew-about-ramen ramen, and some pretty mediocre beer. And some pretty good beer. I’d highly recommend Vancouver as a weekend getaway … it’s a little taste of Europe within driving distance.

On the way back, we had to cross the border back into the U.S., and on Sundays, the line can be pretty long. We waited almost two hours, which was annoying, but gave me time to fixate on a particularly odd element of the experience and think far too deeply on it. I give you: America’s First Brand Touchpoint.

The first thing that struck me was how ugly it is. The red, white and blue color palette seems self-evident, but the type? Yuck. I mean, was “Brush Script” really the best font the designer could come up with? Don’t get me wrong … plenty of good fonts (Helvetica and Futura, to name a few) come with a computer when you buy one, but Brush Script is not one of them. Here’s what this sign says to me:

The second thing I fixated on was the illustrations. They definitely represent some of America’s top tourist attractions, and are probably the icons most strongly associated with these 50 nifty united states (although I had to think about what the Capitol was for a minute). The sign is missing one of my favorites, South Dakota’s Corn Palace, which would be someplace between the Arch and Mt. Rushmore.

More puzzling than the choice of landmarks is their order. Considering maps’ typical orientation formula, where “north=up,” the order of the illustrations is backwards. The west coast should be on the left, and the easternmost icons on the right.

But then, I thought maybe this designer is smarter than I am giving him credit for. Maybe he is orienting the sign to the northern visitor’s perspective. Facing south towards the U.S., you’d head left (or east) to reach the Statue of Liberty, and keep on going straight to hit Seattle’s iconic tower.

When I considered the adjoining timber supports, I decided the designer hadn’t given it much thought at all, from the type to the material choices. We’re rolling out the welcome wagon for the huddled masses, and the “designer” chooses pressure treated lumber cut in a faux-pioneer style? No wonder people hate us. They come looking for freedom, and we give them bad taste incarnate: copper-impregnated, third-string lumber and a default font. Welcome to America, land of lazy designers.