October 5, 2005
"Cars and Stripes"

Recently, I received a bottle of Panza wine from the Quixote Winery in Napa. What caught my attention about this bottle was not the label but the way the red and black stripes completed the top. It brought a sense of humor and play—and an unconventional resolution—to the foil wrapper covering the cork. Although such an element might be considered inconsequential, it illustrates the pleasure the designer derives from the details of common objects. This was not a whimsical bottle of cheap wine—it was an excellent 2001 Petite Syrah, and I keep the bottle around to enjoy its lighthearted, rebellious nature.

The bottle reminded me of the design conventions of stripes and their visual power. Once you take notice, you realize that stripes are ubiquitous in the environment. My earliest recollections of stripes come from childhood, and they're all joyful: funny socks, Dr. Seuss hats, summer beach towels and surf mats. Stripes endeared me to the zebra and skunk over other beasts, because they seemed to insert fantasy into the natural world. If we study stripes, we see that they appear in an array of authoritative applications: highway markings that alert us to dangerous intersections; referee shirts in football; and military badges. To writer Owen Edwards, stripes are most obvious on sports and racing cars; indeed, they crop up repeatedly on designs that depend on motion and speed, like trains and planes. They often arise in the very structure of buildings when siding materials and masonry are used as visual bands to wrap the structures. If you doubt that they carry meaning and cultural significance, consider flags generally and the flag proposed for the European Union in 2001 by Rem Koolhaas in particular, which was an attempt to combine the spirit of many nations through stripes.

Legendary graphic designer Paul Rand has been called the "king of stripes," and Rand's seminal A Designer's Art appropriately has stripes on its spine, allowing it to leap out visually from the bookshelf. The iconic IBM logo that Rand created in 1972 boldly interjected white space through a serious blue corporate symbol to make the letters appear more ethereal and technologically apt. Stripes make us rethink the basic way in which we take meaning from letters and symbols. Apple's 1976 logo was often depicted with bands of equally spaced colors, slicing through the iconic fruit and bringing levity, cheer and personality to a sign that would read very differently if it were a literal Pippin or Rome Beauty. What does a computer business have to do with an apple, anyway? The stripes shatter our ability to apply simple or direct meaning to the symbol.

In the world of clothing, stripes go in and out of fashion while remaining the bastion of tradition. At one end of the spectrum are the designs of Alexander Girard and Paul Smith, and at the other is the traditional business attire of pinstripe shirts and repp ties. Stripes are common in the pants that chefs wear in restaurants around the world. The seafaring crowd—from gondoliers to pirates and sailors—have fancied stripes for centuries. Stripes are also indispensable to athletic jerseys in many sports.

Stripes grab visual attention, yet they also add mystery to communication. They take your eye toward an object, then away, provoking the mind. They are a kind of trick—and tricky to use as well. We've included a collection of recent stripe-inspired photos, and we're soliciting jpegs of your own interesting examples of stripes, a selection of which we will publish. We also encourage you to pick up a bottle of the Panza Petite Syrah and Rand's A Designer's Art.