Monday, June 25, 2007

For the Record...

This is my mailbox. I figured I should post it before my friends and family decided to out me as a hypocrit.

What's my mailbox say about me? It says I'm cheap, lazy and spend too much time in front of the computer and not enough time outside working on my landscape. Case in point, instead of getting out there and trying to scrub the mildew off it, I'm in here blogging about it.

So Artbot asked me what I thought was "successful mailbox design"? I wish I had some well thought out response to that. I actually thought about putting some time into answering it and then I realized that like Tim Morris wrote in his article Mailboxes,
"Hideous boxes fight the battle of decoration against function. When you come right down to it, a mailbox is as close to pure function as it gets. You want it to be a box, and you want to get mail in it. It doesn't strictly require anything more than that. A plain container will do. But there is something in the suburban mind that militates against unadorned function. We have too much of that anyway."

I've had the link to that story up on this blog since day one. I came across it when I was doing a little research for this. It's really a great read. Long, but insightful and echos my sentiments. A mailbox is a necessary evil and the best thing you can hope for is inconspicuousness.

In my opinion, if I drive by a mailbox and don't stop to take a picture of it, it's successful design. That's my thinking anyway but I'm just a cheap, lazy, gamer. My mailbox says so.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Suddenly I feel dirty for thinking about this too much. That's what I get for working on weekends in an empty office.

Anonymous said...

it's true, mailboxes for the most part are ugly. i think sometime in the future you should ask people to submit asethetically pleasing mailboxes (not from catologues) and dedicate a post to those.

mailboxes said...

this is really good post and good post should have good comments, let me suggest www.mailboxer.dk for mailboxes.