15 Intricate Design Secrets That Most People Probably Haven’t Thought About, As Shared By A Designer On TikTok

"If you watch a lot of old cartoons, you would notice a lot of the main characters are always wearing neckties or neck collars that are always covering their necks and disconnecting their head from their body. Once again, it’s no accident, that is by design. In the 1960s the iconic duo Hanna-Barbera were cranking out 6 hours of cartoon television every single week to over 300 million viewers around the globe. However, at the same time, the studio’s budget kept shrinking and shrinking, which actually threatened the entire hand-drawn animation industry. In a stroke of genius, they came up with a new technique that reduced the animation effort by 7000%. By giving characters something to wear around their necks, it meant that animators could keep the exact same body position and only animate the head while it was moving and talking, which not only meant that the frames required for a 7 min cartoon were reduced from 14000 down to just 2000, but this move is actually credited with saving the entire animation industry."

"The Houston Airport in Texas was experiencing an extraordinary amount of complaints regarding the baggage claim wait times. Executives tried to solve this by increasing staff, which did in fact help and reduced the waiting time down to 8 minutes, which was the industry average, but despite that, the complaints still persisted. Upon further investigation, they found out that it only took passengers 1 minute to walk from their arrival gate to baggage claim and then 7 more minutes for their luggage to arrive. Which meant that 88% of the time was spent standing around doing nothing and just waiting. So the airport came up with a clever solution. They moved baggage claim as far as possible, so now it took passengers 6 times longer to get to it. And just like that, overnight complaints dropped to nearly zero."

"If you ever noticed that in theatres curtains and seats tend to be the color red, that’s no coincidence, that’s by design. And that’s because the color red is the first color that the human eye loses sight of in dark and low light conditions, making it easier for you to focus on the performance or movie screen and not get distracted by the surroundings."

"Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport had a problem. Local residents were complaining about the excessive noise of airplanes constantly taking off. This problem was even worse during the wintertime because sound vibrations travel even further when the ground is wet or frozen. So the airport kicked off a study that resulted in a brilliant solution using the local landscape. They created these 10-foot-tall triangular wedges and they spaced them apart at a distance equivalent to the wavelength of the actual airplane noise, which turned out to be around 36 feet. The second layer of wedges was added at an 18-degree angle to further reduce the noise and the final result was a total reduction of about 3 to 5.5 decibels and an award-winning design."

"Here’s a design secret about Pringles potato chips whose iconic shape is not arbitrary but actually designed by supercomputers running advanced aerodynamic simulations. Back in the day, Pringles had a manufacturing problem. The production line was moving so fast to meet the high demand that chips were literally flying off of the conveyor belts due to wind resistance. Pringles enlisted the help of supercomputers to come up with an aerodynamic shape for the potato chips known as a hyperbolic paraboloid, so the chips don’t fly off of the production line. The new design was a success but it turned out there were other benefits as well. It made the chips easier to stack, it reduced the chance of them breaking during transport, and it made it so there’s no predictable way for the chips to break in our mouth giving it that oddly satisfying crunch."

"The bicycle company 'Vanmoof' had a problem. Customers were complaining because they were receiving their online orders damaged as delivery people were mishandling packages, throwing them on and off trucks, etc. So the company came up with a brilliant solution by changing the packaging design. They decided to print a TV on the side of the box to make it look like there was a television inside and therefore encouraging the delivery people to be more careful with something as fragile as a TV. And the results – 80% decrease in damaged deliveries, saving the company a ton of money and headaches, I’m sure. Just for fun, they snuck a little Easter egg on the packaging that says: We like bikes And we like you And the rest of the world To ride bikes And like them too"

"If you’ve ever been to London, you might have noticed that a lot of pubs and even other places have these weird names like 'The White Lion,' 'Cat & Fiddle,' 'Bat & Ball,' 'Elephant & Castle,' etc. Now, this trend actually started out as a design solution to a marketing challenge. Since many of the pubs in Britain are hundreds of years old, back in those days, a lot of people were illiterate, which meant that they couldn’t easily identify and discover businesses. So business owners got creative and instead of using letters, they started using pictures of easily identifiable and recognizable objects in their logos, so that even people that can’t read can still find the business easily."