Design Rx
Sleeker, simpler, safer, the dowdy pill bottle gets a makeover
Deborah Adler ’97 sometimes wears red shoes. When in Burlington, she prefers the spinach melt to the turkey-apple-smoked-gouda at the Red Onion. For her design school thesis, she redesigned the amber prescription pill bottle, creating a better, safer system adopted by Target and exhibited in New York’s Museum of Modern Art. This story is brought to you by Vermont Quarterly magazine.
Let’s pause. The above paragraph, almost incomprehensible in its lurching from irrelevance to crucial details and back, reads like the scramble of information adorning those little orange bottles of prescription pills. The bottles you take for granted and hardly see. The bottles Deborah Adler never thought about until her grandma got sick.
Pill bottles and bad magazine paragraphs have one crucial difference, though. Understanding medicine instructions properly can save your life.
MESSAGE IN A BOTTLE
The story of Adler’s better bottle begins five years ago with her grandparents, who were taking different dosages of the same heart drug.
The incident is easy to imagine. An older person is confronted by a busy day, a crowded medicine cabinet, and two nearly identical flasks. She reaches out, hand faintly trembling, and chooses the wrong one, Herman’s instead of Helen’s. Illness ensues.
Was this accident, and thousands more like it, the fault of the patient—or the package?
Adler, then a graduate design student at the School of Visual Arts in New York, suspected that her grandmother wasn’t alone in her befuddlement. She began investigating, and quickly became convinced that the confusing and awkward pill bottle, which had remained essentially unchanged since World War II, was actually dangerous. After all, people take their medicine alone, with no guidance from doctor or pharmacist; the bottle is a person’s sole resource at the decisive moment when they swallow. Adler was seeking a thesis project both personally meaningful and professionally relevant; she wanted to create something that would live and help people. She realized she had it, and began by dissecting the problems with the old-style pill bottle.
“One issue is that it is round. You actually have to turn it in a circle to read all the information. You can’t see everything at one glance. And the biggest thing on the label is the drugstore logo,” Adler says in the Manhattan conference room of Milton Glaser Inc., where she is a senior designer. She recaps her finding while jabbing at an old-fashioned label with genteel disdain. “This information here, ‘Take one tablet daily,’ looks like it’s part of the person’s home address. This number ten? Is that ten milligrams? Ten pills? Ten times a day—who knows?"
The problems go on and on. Pharmacists staple crucial warnings to the bag; patients invariably toss them out. Warning labels are small and cryptic—Adler says the icon for “take on a full stomach” looks like a gas tank—and they are usually red or orange, fading into the orange bottle. A child’s antibiotic is dispensed from a vial identical to her father’s sleeping pills; that hard-to-read label is the only way to keep drugs separated by family member. It’s easier to keep toothbrushes straight than powerful medications.
In addition to that long list of problems, her analysis and research yielded a short list of goals. She wanted to create a bottle that was intuitive: People could open their medicine cabinets, and with little more than a glance know which bottle is theirs, what the drug is, and how to take it.
“Commonsensical, isn’t it?” she says.
But no one had ever done it that way before. The old pill bottles were never truly designed, they just sort of evolved in the cheapest possible form from the often-conflicting dictates of state pharmacy regulators and the whims of mass-market retailers. Adler’s current boss, Milton Glaser, a legend of graphic design whose creations include the “I♥NY” logo, says the whole sorry situation presented an ideal opportunity for a young designer.
“The need was important and obvious, but unfulfilled,” says Glaser. “There was no lack of complaint, but there was a lack of understanding that the package was at fault, that this stupid thing involved in the lives of so many people could be better and safer.”
Adler began sketching, and solutions quickly took shape. Each family member would get a bottle with a color-coded label; blue for mom, red for dad, and so on. The bottle itself would have a D shape: The curved front would mimic the classic curve of a pill bottle, but the flat back would provide an easy-to-read surface for drug warnings. The detailed drug information—the stuff stapled to the bag that most people recycled unread—would fit into a slot in the back of the bottle. The child-proof screw cap, a hurdle as daunting to arthritic hands as tearing the telephone book, would be replaced with a flip top. A groove in the top of the cap would hold a little reminder card with specific instructions like “Take 1 p.m. Wednesday.” Her project bottle even included a thin magnifying glass to decode tiny type. And, of course, Adler redesigned the label, dividing the label’s information into primary (drug name, dosage, instructions) and secondary information (doctor’s name, quantity, expiration date) and thinking hard about the best ways to use color, contrast, and typography to put that information forward.
The thesis earned praise from her teachers, but Adler wanted it to save lives. She went to the FDA in hopes of making the label a national standard, but ran into a dead end. She worked on a business plan with an MBA student, but it came to nothing. She landed design jobs at Kiehl’s and Milton Glaser, launching her career as a graphic designer. A couple years went by, but Adler refused to let her thesis sit.
“I knew it would happen. Sometimes in your life you just know,” she says. “It’s not that I am necessarily an extremely confident person. I have my insecurities. But I just knew that this was better and that it would happen. I just had to figure out how.”
ON TARGET
The breakthrough came after a personal connection helped get her design in front of a creative director for Target. The company loved Adler’s ideas, and acquired the entire system in August 2004, beginning a life-changing sprint of work. While keeping her day job, Adler collaborated with Target and an industrial designer named Klaus Rosburg to transform the thesis into a finished project that would debut in 1,300 stores and be marketed through a designer-centered media campaign.
The work was an after-hours process of collaboration and compromise. As she worked full time at her day job, Adler refined the bottle project nights and weekends, dealing with issues huge (the bottle’s shape, which Rosburg eventually flipped and flattened) to minute (Adler designed 23 variations of the label to conform to conflicting state regulations). Some of the changes were extensive, others just tweaks, but the final product stayed true to Adler’s original vision of a better label working in tandem with a better bottle to make taking prescription drugs safer and less stressful.
“The main ideas all stayed in, and I’m really happy about that,” she says.
The design, to say the least, was a hit. Television, radio, magazines, Web: Adler, and her bottle, which Target dubbed ClearRx, were suddenly near-ubiquitous design celebrities. Adler starred in a commercial that aired widely during the Winter Olympics, and the company is rolling out a print advertising campaign featuring her and her grandmother this month. The bottle showed up in The New York Times Magazine’s 2005 “Year in Ideas” issue and was listed as one of the year’s best inventions in Time and Business Week. The bottle brought props from the design world as well; it was featured in a Museum of Modern Art exhibition last fall, and will also appear in the 2007 design triennial at the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. Most satisfyingly for Adler, her creation inspired many nurses and doctors, including the US Surgeon General, to write letters of praise.
The bottle’s widespread success doesn’t surprise Paola Antonelli, acting chief curator of architecture and design at MoMA. Antonelli says she respects Adler’s talent—but even more so, she admires her determination to see the project through a complicated corporate process. Making that happen, and ending up with something good, is a rare feat. Antonelli believes that Adler’s ability to persist successfully, and the pressing need, are major reasons why the bottle has been so successful.
“Designers are not there to add curlicues; they are there to make things useable by people in safe, pleasant, understandable, and emotionally fulfilling ways,” Antonelli says.
That mission, the designer’s life, is an “endless process” for Adler, a self-sustaining loop of learning, working, and exploring. Which may be why, as she sits down for a lunch interview, she is as interested in asking questions as answering them. Among her diverse projects—medical packaging, football stadium signage, restaurant interiors, youth centers, and of course continually refining ClearRx—she is currently studying hospitals for a new project. When she hears about her interviewer’s recent experience in one, the questions flow.
Later, as the tables begin to turn back on the interview, she says: “You want to know what I do? It’s this. I do research. I ask questions. Maybe even annoy people. I want to understand things completely. I can’t make things clearer if I don’t truly understand them.”
In confusion, Deborah Adler seeks clarity and new ways of thinking. Through the praise, publicity, and ongoing attention, she has stayed focused on the next design challenge and strived to avoid being daunted by the extent and speed of success.
“It does worry me a little bit—no, I don’t even want to say that. Because you really can’t think that way,” she says of having her very first project hit big. “I might not ever top this, but I can do other things that are just as good. They might not get as much attention, but that doesn’t really matter. The work will give me as much satisfaction.”
(for UVM staff)