31–40 of 237 posts
Dyes, machines and laundry detergent all changed for the better. I haven't inadvertently made things pink in 20 years now. The red now holds. Even new jeans come prewashed. My machine seems to be much gentler too.
Its not a hard task building a washing machine or tumble dryer that matches the washing symbols, but it seems to be for the current industry leaders!
Let's simply make all clothes compatible with a regular wash and tumble dry process.
If the clothes use a dye that isn't waterproof, use a different dye. If the fabric is too fragile to withstand spinning, use a stronger fabric. If a material can't withstand the heat of a dryer, use better material.
Material science has come so far in the past 100 years that we can meet or exceed the performance of pretty much any of last centuries materials while also being able to make the stuff washable.
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> If it worked for so many years, a lot of people are familiar with them The thesis is that they don't work, at all. I have to look them up every time because they are absolutely inscrutable today. Laundry symbols are rarely looked at for most folks, so they have to be maximally communicative. It's not good enough if the only people that know what they mean are those that deal with them constantly.
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If it doesn't go into Normal Cold Wash / Low heat tumble dry, it has no place in our household - life is too short! :)
Weird fact: Despite having been around for decades, laundry symbols have not been assigned Unicode code points. This mailing list email from Ken Whistler in 2003[1] suggests the existence of a conflicting Canadian standard as a reason, along with a philosophy of not including "icons" (especially color-coded ones!) in a "character" set, given that pictographic language is likely to change over the next century.
(Unicode threw that out the window in 2010 when they standardized emojis, and given how complex emojis have become Ken's argument is sounding better and better...)
[1] http://unicode.org/mail-arch/unicode-ml/y2003-m06/0274.html
Within a second of seeing the 'improved' ones I spot what is, to my mind at least, an immediate failure - the detail resolution is far too small. It doesn't account for the printing limitations on small fabric tags, never mind the ability of old fogeys such as myself to be able to squint that hard and actually read them. I have no idea even looking on my screen here what the difference between the first three is supp…
The iconography is updated which is nice but the line weights are too thick.
Some of these are better (the bleach one being the most obvious) but most of them are worse or neutral. If I don't know what a line under the washing machine means, how am I supposed to know what the 2nd button means. The line is at least more visible. It's similar for the iron. Maybe dots as temperature isn't obvious, but it's about as clear as the thermometer, is easy to read, and matches the icons on the iron itse…
The original dry-clean and do not dry-clean ones are the most confusing for me. A plain circle is somehow meant to represent dry-cleaning ?
At least that's how I see it, it could also just have been the last obvious symbol remaining after square/triangle were taken.
It’s a decent start, but without testing, there’s no evidence that these icons are any better than the originals. I’m not sure that they even meets the authors own objectives — there are more small details that are harder to resolve at small sizes and likely would be harder to print clearly. They also aren’t any more “googleable” than the originals. Lastly, they also assume that users are familiar with front loading…
All that said, I've been ignoring the labels for years, and never had a problem.
Speaking of bad design, who thought it was a good idea to blink the labels in the animation, immediately after saying half of people asked knew none of the symbols?