I got lost on my way to the post office when I realized I wasn't going to the post office. I just grabbed the package delivery notice and walked out the door without noticing that the address on the slip wasn't the main office on the Singel, but a tobacconist in the Jordaan. Which is when I realized that I'm still not reconciled to the rebranding of the Dutch post as TNT, the courier company it acquired a few years ago.
Like a lot of national mail services, the Dutch one actually went private years ago, but the red white and blue branding stayed the same. The French are born stylists. The Dutch are born designers. But that particular color combination seems to repel the assaults of sophistication. Maybe it has something to do with color theory. Or maybe those colors are used in many cases where, for cultural or political reasons, color choice is the main element of the branding so no one (except the Dutch) ever felt the need to make it look good as well.
But aesthetic clunkiness is kind of reassuring in vital services. As one of the most visible and relied upon pieces of public infrastructure, the postal service should have an overengineered, neutral, tenured, clunky quality to it. Like British electric plugs. What is up with those things? You could buy a beryllium computing wafer activated by your thoughts but it will still be shackled to a prop from a Frankenstein movie, a memento mori of postwar scarcity and material rebuke to the transcendent aspirations of stylish electronic devices and their jumped-up pantry boy owners.
But the British love their plugs with a surprising ferocity, usually wrapped around a suspiciously rehearsed sounding list of Reasons Why The British Plug Is Technically Superior. But this defensiveness is as transparent as it is unnecessary. They love the BS 1363 because it is a cultural icon, contrapositive proof of the stoic equation of beauty with lack of character.
For my part, I don't want a Postal Service that's bright and trendy and whose CEO is on myspace (Ok, that's probably not him, but you get the idea.) Mail service should be guild-like, secure in its values, bureaucratic in the best possible way. And its visual signature should be, not ugly, but not especially pretty either.
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