A well-designed pill bottle may not cure diseases, but it can save lives. Target's Clear Rx^SM packaging system, designed by School of Visual Arts masters student Deborah Adler, offers just such a break-through in prescription packaging.

The pharmaceutical industry often talks about addressing "unmet medical needs," but it invariably means discovering new drugs, not redesigning the package in which they are sold. In fact, the familiar round amber-colored pill bottle has remained virtually unchanged since the end of World War II, except for a switch to child-proof caps in the 1970s. It took a design student named Deborah Adler at the School of Visual Arts in New York City to question why this had to be the case.

As part of a two-year masters program, chaired by Steven Heller and Lita Talarico, Adler was charged with developing a product from scratch for a "Designer as Author" course. "It is about authorship and owning your own stuff," explains Adler. The thesis assignment required going through all the steps of designing a product and taking it to market, including writing a business plan and researching manufacturability.

Adler recalls that while she was mulling over "a whole bunch of thesis ideas," her dad happened to mention that her grandmother had accidentally taken her grandfather's medication. Looking at the nearly identical pill bottles, she could see how easily such a mistake could be made, especially since her grandparents, Helen and Herman Adler, had similar starting names and were on the same medication but at different doses. The potential for tragedy was chilling to consider.

"I realized that my grandparents were not alone in their confusion," Adler says, "and I thought maybe I'd redesign the medicine bottle for my masters thesis."

Redoing a pill bottle for a design assignment was not a particularly glamorous undertaking, which some of Adler's teachers pointed out when they asked her if this was truly what she wanted to do. It was. As Adler began deconstructing the standard prescription drug bottle, she became acutely aware that it is rife with problems. "The largest type on the label is the drugstore logo," she points out. "The name of the drug often is tucked at the bottom of the label-that's a pretty important piece of information."

Also, numbers are often printed on the label without explanation of what they mean. Crucial warning stickers are slapped on haphazardly, sometimes covering part of the label, or are applied vertically to the bottle. What's more, these stickers are frequently printed black type on red paper or orange against the amber bottle, making readability even harder. Then, if you could read it at all, it may say something like, "Do not take with nitrate," leaving many to puzzle out what constitutes a nitrate.

"I know these things seem obvious, but you have to dumb yourself down to figure out all the problems," says Adler, rattling off the several points that came to her immediate attention. It wasn't just information on the bottle that struck her as a problem, but the shape of the bottle too. The round shape of the bottle "makes it hard to read on a curve," Adler points out. "You have to rotate the bottle in a circle to get all the information."

Adler noticed other glaring flaws as well. The information sheet included with the medication is "a designer's nightmare," she says. "Typographically, there are issues of leading, kerning and line length. The average line length that people are willing to read is about nine to 10 words; your eyes get tired after that. The type on a typical information sheet is more than double the length. No one would want to read that. Nine out of 10 times the information sheet ends up in the trash can."

Tapping into existing research on how people process information, Adler also learned that if 10 people were asked to list items in order of importance, 40% would put the first four in the same order. She kept this in mind when she gathered plexi tubing, plexi sheets and dollhouse brackets and set about constructing a prototype bottle and label. She decided to divide the front label information into primary and secondary levels, with critical information above a black horizontal line and less important facts below. She reserved the flat backside for warning labels, with a grooved slot to hold a succinctly written and less jargon-filled information card. To allow people in the same household to identify their medication on sight, she came up with a color-coding system-for instance, green for grandma, yellow for grandpa.

Adler's next step was to find out if her bottle design could be commercially made. She tracked down a small manufacturing plant. "I got passed from person to person until I ended up with the actual plant manager," she says. "He was very enthusiastic and also shed a lot of light on the industry."

Adler explains, "I was thinking beyond school. I would talk to people at the plant to find out what it takes to make a mold. How much it would cost, whether a plant had to buy new machinery or could work with existing molds." The new type of prescription label also was an innovation that required investigation.

By the time Adler completed her school project, she says, "I knew what I had was better than what existed. Once I realized that, I thought I should protect it by getting a patent for my design. I took a drive with my husband to Washington and met with the National Council on Patient Information and Education and the Federal Drug Administration."

At that point, Adler's prototype could have languished in obscurity had it not been for what she describes as an "aligning of the stars." After graduating from SVA, she landed a job in the studio of her mentor, Milton Glaser. He proudly showed Adler's pill bottle to his friend, designer Ann Willoughby, who was then co-chairing the AIGA Gain conference and in touch with Minda Gralnek, creative director for Target. Gralnek recalls, "Ann called to say she had seen a great project from a design student and said that person wanted to talk to someone at Target. Would I be interested in talking with her? I said, ‘Sure, have her call me.' I was planning a trip to New York anyway and thought I'd love to visit Milton Glaser's studio and meet Deborah."

As it happened, Gralnek invited along a Target colleague working on strategic alliances. As soon as the two saw the design, they knew it was right for them. "I just looked at the label and said, ‘Wow, we should do this,'" Gralnek remembers.

A few weeks later, Adler, accompanied by Glaser for support, was on her way to Target's Minneapolis headquarters to meet with company executives. Convinced that Target customers would welcome the new packaging, Target took the unusual step of fast-tracking the changeover and assigned a 100-person Target team to make it happen quickly. Target also brought on industrial designer Klaus Rosberg of Sonic to work out manufacturing details.

"It took us less than a year to introduce the new packaging, which is pretty amazing," says Gralnek. Target boldly designated Adler the principal designer, making her an integral part of the development process.

"It could have gone in a totally different way," Adler recognizes. "They could have taken my idea and said, ‘See you later,' but they didn't. They valued me. It was a huge collaborative effort. I worked closely with people to make sure that the label that I designed in Illustrator could be translated into a major software system that pharmacists could use. I worked with bottle and label manufacturers, and with the marketing team to make sure they told the story. Target also had to train the pharmacists who were at the front line."

The final prescription drug bottle remained largely true to Adler's initial concept, except for the shape of the bottle, which originally had a wider curved front and flat back, requiring a semi-circle cap. The need to redesign the child-safety cap and get it through regulatory approvals, a process that would have taken about seven years, forced Target to look for an alternate cap solution. Creating a wedge-shaped bottle with the cap upside down remedied that problem. Adler's prototype also featured a clear bottle, which had to be changed to a darker shade since some medicines are light-sensitive. Target chose to go with its brand color, red, instead of the traditional amber. The color-coding system also had to be changed from the proposed colored paper, which would have created an inventory headache, to colored rubber rings.

The one thing that Target didn't have to change was the name of the pharmacy that Adler had applied to her prototype. Long before her affiliation with Target, Adler had chosen Target as the hypothetical brand name on her prototype.

"I thought Target would be an excellent platform for my idea," she explains. "They have pharmacies. They are committed to their consumers and have a strong sense of social responsibility, and they are committed to excellent design. It is the core of their brand proposition. I knew they would be more willing to take this sort of risk than other pharmacies."

For Gralnek, the project also "proves that design isn't just objects that are pleasing to the eyes. They are products, processes and experiences. That is what design is at Target."

The breakthrough nature of Adler's prescription pill bottle is winning accolades, not just from Target customers but from U.S. Surgeon General Richard H. Carmona, who hailed it as "an important step in improving the health
literacy of all Americans."

Target is continuing to work closely with Adler and Glaser to broaden the Clear Rx prescription packaging system. A follow-on to the original pill bottle is a liquid dispenser with a spill-proof syringe to measure out the exact dosage needed. Adler and Milton Glaser's studio have also designed a set of 25 easy-to-understand warning icons to go on the back of Clear Rx bottles.

Adler gratefully acknowledges Glaser's support. From early on, Glaser recognized that Adler's pill bottle was far more than a clever design done by a smart student. It did what good design does best-offer a solid solution to an existing problem. The value Glaser placed on Adler's bottle design came through to her in a remark he made shortly after she joined his studio. "We were riding in a cab on one of my first days on the job, and Milton said to me ‘I'd really like to see this happen in my lifetime.'" Fortunately it did.

And, oh, yes, Adler aced her class.