Best of British Design

59 pointsposted 9 hours ago
by ArisC

36 Comments

Tiberium

9 hours ago

> 64 icons. Six rounds. One winner.

The winner is Claude

dofm

6 hours ago

That is pretty standard sports/quiz show announcer tone, is it not?

scrumper

8 hours ago

Concorde vs. the Union Flag? In the round of 64? Bah. Impossible to continue.

EDIT Agh now Range Rover v Mini? What do you want from me!?

bearbin

8 hours ago

Voting for a anglo-FRENCH design above the union flag! No contest there (despite the Concorde being a great bit of kit).

scrumper

8 hours ago

Well chief designer was a Brit but yes that is a fair point. I went with Concorde, rationalizing that the flag is more an evolutionary agglomeration than a conscious piece of design. It's a weak argument I know.

SwellJoe

7 hours ago

I mostly agreed with the crowd, but the crowd picked St. Paul's Cathedral over the Mini, and that's absurd. I've never once seen a St. Paul's Cathedral on the road, and it did not appear in either version of the Italian Job.

blululu

7 hours ago

This is delightful. Feels like old early 2000s era click spam but the creator didn’t even bother to monetize it. The supermarine spitfire edging out that phone booth is a tough call. This honestly there is something kind of sad about the whole premise. Britain is still so stacked with talent, but it also feels like they’re getting brain drained hard and without an industrial culture to back it up a lot of this talent doesn’t get the same level of visibility as it did in a previous era.

FuckButtons

6 hours ago

I have lived outside the uk now for the majority of the years of I have been able to drive.

The winner was a foregone conclusion, transport signage everywhere else I’ve lived and driven extensively other than the uk is a patchwork mess that has clearly had exactly no thought put into it.

dofm

7 hours ago

For me this was always going to end up being the Spitfire vs the Zebra crossing. But at one point I had to choose between the miniskirt and Tower Bridge and that was difficult.

TripleDylan

7 hours ago

Hard choices for me, I ended with the Harrier Jump Jet and the Anglepoise Lamp as my finalists. I'm a little sad to see the exclusion of British audio equipment such as the naim Audio NAP 250!

jstanley

9 hours ago

Pretty cool, but it always ends on Spitfire vs Mini and I don't know how you decide.

scun

8 hours ago

I heard you can put a Merlin in a Mini if you remove the front seats

NordStreamYacht

5 hours ago

Easier to buy a classic mini and drive it around than a spitfire.

mini FTW

spankibalt

5 hours ago

Damn, quite some brutal matchups! My eternal champion spits fire, runner-up is the Mini. :)

gerdesj

8 hours ago

I ended up with two bridges in the final which is quite strange for the owner of an IT firm, but I did study Civ Eng, 27 years ago.

heybmac

8 hours ago

Best of lists are always tough. In this case, is it: most iconic, most effective, most influential? I feel this way about film lists, too. The most interesting conversation is not what is the best picture, but which & how parameters are weighted: novelty, craft, cultural zeitgeist, etc.

ascorbic

7 hours ago

Not many things make me feel particularly patriotic, but this is doing a pretty good job

t1234s

9 hours ago

McLaren P1 should be on that list

user

9 hours ago

[deleted]

ssl232

9 hours ago

Spitfire vs Concorde in my final, and Concorde won.

vrnmh

8 hours ago

The winner is teapot. 2nd is mini skirt

robotmay

7 hours ago

Mallard (and the rest of the A4 class, though that blue is my favourite livery on any of them) will always be the best for me, but I do love steam locomotives. It's utterly beautiful whilst also being extremely good at its role, and that's the definition of design I believe in.

So much of modern design, particularly vehicles, is missing _something_. Maybe it's the lack of hand-rolled panels and everything being slightly too perfect, or maybe we've just lost a bit of that pizazz over the past 100 years.

orf

7 hours ago

Really enjoyed this, well done

user

8 hours ago

[deleted]

dm319

8 hours ago

UK road signs won for me. Something about the type-face, colours and design.

user

9 hours ago

[deleted]

lowbloodsugar

9 hours ago

Spitfire. All day every day. Just don't forget Miss Schilling's orifice.

scrumper

8 hours ago

Hers is quite a story. I think my favorite part of it was when she refused to marry her future husband until he had also won an award for lapping Brooklands at over 100mph on a motorbike, something she had already achieved. (Another lovely detail is that she used her racing motorbike to cross the country from airbase to airbase installing her orifices on Spitfires.)

FridayoLeary

6 hours ago

Two interesting choices. The Tube map is on the list. It's been massively downgraded in recent years, becuase the people updating it have no appreciation of what made it great. Here's a tip; if it's not a train and it doesn't go underground then it shouldn't be on the map.

The Union Jack is another interesting choice, because these days apparently it's a racist symbol.

Angel of the North is another interesting choice, becuase i've been there and it's the most overrated, featureless lump of metal ever. Cool that they made it I guess, but they could have done more imho.

kypro

7 hours ago

Surprised myself a bit with the pillar post box being my winner.

I love the British phone box too, but I think because my childhood neighbourhood was built in the 80s I never really saw the traditional red phone boxes when I was young. They were all these, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KX_telephone_boxes

The post boxes are lovely though and remind me of my England more than any of the others.

onevsall

6 hours ago

Same winner, and I've never bren to Great Britain. I do not like these. I prefer tier lists where a lot of these would be S tier.

Transformanshen

8 hours ago

In this bracket my choice invariably comes down to the Spitfire versus the Mini, and I always favor the Spitfire, as the Mini reminds me of the terrible parking