Nearly every error message on the web shows up in the color red. Something about red just screams “warning! alert! fire!” So what’s a web designer to do when red is already prominent in the design?

Virgin America chose purple. Since Virgin’s colors are red and white, a red error message would have been invisible. But this purple-pink gradient stands out well enough and, unlike red, it doesn’t aggravate the reader. If anything, it has a calming effect, mirroring the peaceful violet interiors of Virgin’s planes.

I’m pleased to announce that at least one company has finally designed a better butter label. Clover, the people with the silly cartoon cows, has started marking 1/4, 1/3, and 1/2-cup measurements on their wrappers, in addition to the tablespoon measurements.

As you can see, their organic butter (top image) doesn’t use the helpful new label — only the non-organic kind. Well, it’s a start!

The first thing that I noticed is that these look like perfectly normal tomatoes. Salmonella, a bacterium, is invisible to the naked eye. So why is the FDA showing me absolutely useless pictures of infected tomatoes?

The second thing I noticed is that the captions seem to attribute blame -- and, therefore, agency -- to the tomatoes themselves, as though they actively conspired to spread disease among the human population. The images now look more like police lineup photos, like something on the FBI’s most wanted list:

Image source: Jason Michael, Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 License

Most keys on a keyboard make intuitive sense, even to a novice computer user, since nearly all of them are labeled with either familiar symbols (such as letters or numbers) or with recognizable words (enter, delete, escape). The Apple key, however, has no familiar symbols beyond the company logo, a mark whose meaning on something that you press is unclear. Also on that key, the presence of a second, even less-meaningful mark -- the so-called “propeller” -- and the lack of a written label add to user confusion.

Try explaining basic user interface tasks to anyone new to the Mac, and you’ll see what I mean. You can refer to it as “the Apple key,” which is descriptive, but the apple symbol has no on-screen significance. The propeller mark does appear on-screen, but only the Mac-initiated know that propeller means command. As a result, the Apple key is now called the command key, but that wasn’t always the case.

Having wondered about this glaring usability flaw for years, I was excited to discover this interview with members of the Lisa development team from the February 1983 issue of Byte Magazine. The Lisa was Apple’s short-lived, yet groundbreaking predecessor to the Macintosh. In the interview, Larry Tesler, who was in charge of the Lisa’s applications software, explains how the Apple logo ended up on the keyboard:

[In a prototype version of the keyboard] you saw two keys that said Command on them. The new version has only one, and instead of saying Command it has a picture of an apple on it. The reason is that the key’s used as a shortcut to choose a menu command. If you look at a menu, on the right you’ll see this little apple symbol and a letter.

Image source: DigiBarn, Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 License

If you hold down the Apple key and the letter, you get the command. We couldn’t find any way to symbolize the Command key that would fit nicely in a menu and be recognizable to people. We tried and tried. Finally we decided that the apple looked nice and had a nice sound to it -- “Apple X,” “Apple R” -- and it keeps Apple in the mind of the user instead of “control” or something else. It’s a symbol that everybody using this machine will recognize instantly, so we decided to put it on the key as well as on the screen.

The Macintosh project “borrowed” many user interface concepts from the Lisa team (who, in turn, had borrowed from Xerox’s Star), including the innovation of associating key-combination shortcuts with graphical menu items. But the Macintosh abandoned the Apple symbol in its menu shortcuts in favor of a geometric, propeller-like shape that represented “command.” Although the new abstract symbol is even less meaningful to the uninitiated, it makes more sense as visual shorthand than the company’s logo. For almost the entire history of the Macintosh, though, this key has been marked with both symbols, even though the Mac’s on-screen UI always referred to it as “command” and never “Apple.”

Only in the last year or so has Apple dropped the vestigial logo from the command key, starting with the new aluminum keyboard (below) as well as on the MacBook. The word “command” or at least “cmd” has been added, too -- something that should have been done 24 years ago.

Image source: Declan Jewell, Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 License

[Update: Finally, a better butter wrapper!]

I can cook. I can follow a recipe, and I am comfortable in the kitchen. But I don’t have my Imperial unit conversion values memorized, so I don’t know off the top of my head, for example, that 16 tablespoons equals 1 cup.

When cooking with butter, I usually rely on the stick itself to provide me with the guidance I need. In this case, the recipe called for 3/4 of a cup. Super, no problem. Okay, let’s see what the wrapper can do to help us. It says:

1/4 LB = 8 TBSP

1/4 LB = 1/2 CUP

ONE LB = 2 CUPS

THIS UNIT NOT LABELED FOR RETAIL SALE.

How is any of this useful information? I don’t know about you, but I never measure my ingredients in pounds. But somewhere out there, a butter label designer thinks that’s exactly what I want to know. And maybe if I worked in a mess hall kitchen, he’d be right, but I don’t.

The problem here is that I have to convert my 3/4 cup value into butter-pounds, a very unfamiliar unit. At long last, I see that:

3/4 cups = 3/8 lbs = 12 Tbsp

Finally! Now I count out the Tbsp markers on the label, see that there are 8 Tbsp in each stick. So I need 12/8 or 1 1/2 sticks.

[Also see an update to this post.]