
USPS Redesign - idan
http://grand-army.com/work/projects/project.php?project=usps_retail
======
tonywebster
The two main typefaces are Knockout and Gotham, both being fonts from Hoefler
& Co. — formerly Hoefler & Frere-Jones (H&FJ), until Jonathan Hoefler
allegedly never gave Tobias Frere-Jones the equity stake he promised,
eventually calling him just an employee[1].

Not only do I think is Hoefler & Co. a terrible company under Hoefler's
leadership for that unethical move, the company has refused for the longest
time to support web fonts using @font-face — now they partially support it,
but only using their proprietary hosting platform, which is just setting a bad
precedent for the open web.

There are plenty of small foundries producing high-quality typefaces, with
@font-face friendly licensing for webfonts. Can we please stop using Hoefler
fonts and supporting this guy?!

[1] [http://www.theverge.com/2014/1/17/5318206/hoefler-and-
frere-...](http://www.theverge.com/2014/1/17/5318206/hoefler-and-frere-jones-
lawsuit)

~~~
imajes
ideologically, i agree, except that HFJ/H&C produce some amazing timeless
typefaces and it's really hard to ignore that.

~~~
Throwaway823
Agreed, they own some of the most well known typefaces in the world. Sadly,
their pricing is absurd.

For example, I run a forum with a million daily page views. If I wanted to use
Gotham, I need to pay $150 for the font, and then subscribe to their cloud
service and pay $450 per month for that amount of page views.

I might be willing to pay a one-time $100 fee to use one of their fonts, or a
$100 per year subscription to use any of their fonts. However, $5,500 a year
for my site? That's almost as much as my servers. It's a laugh, I'll stick
with the well respected free web fonts.

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zomg
in my humble opinion, the "look" of the usps isn't their problem on the retail
side. it's the fact that it's a complete and total PITA to ship with them,
coupled with the wrong incentive structure for their employees.

1\. streamline the process - one form to ship something, a letter, a package,
whatever. one sticker goes on the package to indicate the shipping class
(certified, etc). none of this a sticker here, a red stamp there, etc.

2\. incentivise employees to be PRODUCTIVE. i don't know much about their
existing compensation plan, but every time i go to a PO, no one seems to give
a shit. i ship a lot of packages on my lunch break. the PO is PACKED at
noontime... and there's one person at the desk. REALLY?

anyway, i could go on, but they have a long, long, long, way to go.

~~~
toxican
#2 is the #1 reason why I don't like dealing with the USPS for packages. It's
easier for me to run to the post office and have them walk me through the
process of the more complicated shipping (non-domestic primarily), but the
people there are ass holes. Between the post office where I live and the
office where I work (in two different states), I've never had a good
experience. There's always some pissed off, rude middle aged woman who acts
like I'm an idiot for not being familiar with all of their complicated
protocols and rules for shipping.

So yeah, branding isn't their problem. It's the service itself that blows.

~~~
VLM
The most polite way to put it is people who willfully refuse to learn any
market, are only given the alternatives of being frustrated or ripped off,
often without understanding which is about to happen to them. So in this
individual concrete example, basically you're saying that for a willfully
uninformed customer, the USPS has made a policy decision at a high level to
frustrate you instead of ripping you off, and you'd like to do business with
someone who will rip you off instead of frustrating you. I donno if that's a
huge win or if most people would really prefer that, especially if the
alternative were explained to you.

I've shipped exotic electronics prototypes to Canada, all by myself, gettin it
right the first time, about as exotic as you can get without involving ITAR,
with only minimal and brief research. If you get ITAR involved, then I do feel
your pain, but ITAR isn't the USPS's fault, even if they're the easiest people
to lash out at.

~~~
alarius
There shouldn't need to be any learning of markets or navigating of postal
office policies. This is a business like any other meant to serve their
customers. Shipping a package should and needs to be as easy as checking out
at Wal-Mart.

~~~
VLM
"Shipping a package should and needs to be as easy as checking out at Wal-
Mart."

.gov politicians disagree emphatically. Those regulations weren't made for
fun. They may result in a dysfunctional system. Monopolies do not serve their
customers other than incidentally.

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mgcross
Is OP affiliated? I like the work, but batch processing images constrained to
2700px, then throwing all 60 of them to load at one time is killing you.
Mockups or not, you're getting some traffic, so optimize those images (resize
to 50%; save as 8-bit png for fewer artifacts than jpeg).

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sp332
It's slow to load now, so if it goes down, here's an archive
[http://web.archive.org/web/20140703023941/http://grand-
army....](http://web.archive.org/web/20140703023941/http://grand-
army.com/work/projects/project.php?project=usps_retail)

I agree with jrockway that the "Knockout" font is a little hard to follow. The
eagle at the end looks... cool, but unnecessarily violent :p

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kaivi
A fine example of design for the sake of design.

Is that an amateur proposal, or was this accepted by USPS, polished further
and paid for? Based on the amount of text fillings, looks like the latter is
true. In any way, what I see is highly impractical, and the brand book is far
from complete. Here are some things I dislike about it:

-All caps. This is wrong, and it should be fairly obvious even to a child, when pointed out. Millions of people will see media based on it, and a generation will grow up, struggling to read all-caps price lists, all-caps footnotes and navigating all-caps menus on their smartphones. What's worse, is that they will subconsciously accept it as part of their lives and surroundings.

-Too much visual clutter: completely unjustified use of borders, underlines and dotted lines – also in between semantically same elements.

-What does "→" mean?

-Clickable elements are indistinguishable from statics on self-service terminals and smartphone apps. Footnotes are impractically small even for a HD screen.

Overall impression: somebody, truly oblivious of basic usability principles,
thought that infographics ( _the Daily-Mail-grade ones_ ) and UITableViews are
cool, and built a company identity around them. And the other guys sold it.

~~~
duney
Can you point to some recommended reading for someone looking to learn about
these design principles?

~~~
kaivi
Sure! I am probably biased, but I have been following Artemy and his studio
from the early 2000s. He publishes semi-random notes on design, some of them
influenced by realities of a post-Soviet state. Here is a link to the book:
[http://www.artlebedev.com/mandership/](http://www.artlebedev.com/mandership/)

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maximumoverload
Everything looks better with Gotham, whether it's Obama, DC Comics, Twitter or
USPS.

I also like Montserrat, free typeface kind of similar to Gotham, yet kind of
different.

[http://www.google.com/fonts/specimen/Montserrat](http://www.google.com/fonts/specimen/Montserrat)

[http://www.fontspace.com/julieta-
ulanovsky/montserrat](http://www.fontspace.com/julieta-ulanovsky/montserrat)

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jrockway
It is quite bold and certainly makes an impression. If the post office looked
like this, I think I would be confused for a few seconds as I wondered how I
accidentally stepped into a personality-infused government building.

That said, I find this font incredibly hard to read; it almost feels like it's
not English, and my brain has to work extra-hard to form words from the pixels
on the screen.

~~~
peterjmag
I agree. It's almost painfully difficult in some places. I think the biggest
problem here is the fact that _everything_ is set in all caps, which is a
pretty big typographic no-no.[1] The wide tracking and narrow characters of
the secondary copy don't help either.

[1] [http://typographyforlawyers.com/all-
caps.html](http://typographyforlawyers.com/all-caps.html)

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peterjmag
Looks like the server's getting hammered right now, so here's an article from
Brand New about the redesign, with most of the same images:

[http://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/archives/new_reta...](http://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/archives/new_retail_experience_for_usps_by_grandarmy.php)

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coldcode
Having worked on web projects for the USPS before 2000, I remember they had
the design sense of a rock at that time. One web app I worked on was for
internal use, I had to work with IE 2.X since they had actually paid MS for a
license and shipped it to PO locations on a CD. They wouldn't consider
supporting Netscape which actually functioned even though it was free. I guess
"Welcome to the 21st century".

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bluedevil2k
A little nit-picky thing I have with the USPS's choices are their add-ons for
tracking: USPS Tracking (end-to-end), Return Receipt (proof of delivery),
Signature Confirmation (update to date tracking and proof of delivery) &
Certified Mail (allows receiver to track delivery).

WTF - these are barely differentiated and only confuse people who don't mail
things often. WWSJD (Steve Jobs) - probably have a single add-on choice he'd
call something like PackageKit which would be $2 and include up-to-date
tracking (for buyer and seller) and proof of delivery.

~~~
vadvi
nobody cares about this in this thread.

~~~
ejr

      nobody cares about this in this thread.
    

I care.

The branding, no matter how good looking it is - and it is good - must in the
end enhance the product. But if the product itself is confusing, the branding
and styles can only do so much. Concise product goals make the work of the
designer more focused and the end result would be beautiful to use as well as
look at.

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quink
Before even looking at this, I predict Gotham.

Edit: It's painfully slow to load, but it seems I was right.

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mcosta
I like it, but I ask myself if this design will resist the change of times.

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pteredactyl
Looks good. I wish the US Government wasn't hosing the USPS...

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whistlecrackers
Time to bring back the American Letter Mail Company... though I'm sure some
redesigning could be in order.

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o0-0o
Not many people realize that the USPS is the ONLY federal government
department authorized and mentioned in The Constitution. Cut the other
departments, and give it all to the USPS because constitution.

~~~
burnte
Except it also delegate authority to Congress and the Gov't to do a number of
things, and does not specify how those things should be done, allowing
Congress and the gov't a great deal of freedom in implementation. So no, the
USPS isn't the only constitutional government agency.

