Having the exact right bag for a given situation is half hobby, half compulsion for me. So I have a lot of them. Living carless is part of it. I don’t get to tote around an alarmed, two-ton metal locker everywhere I go.
I started carrying a messenger bag in high school, arguing to administrators that it was a purse and therefore allowed in our dress code. I’ve been buying, trying, and being disappointed by bags for decades now, and would like to suggest the following design principles to any budding bag designers out there.
1) The interior of the bag should be light in color.
Bags are for carrying things. Most things are neither white in color nor self-illuminating. A dark interior makes it harder to see the things, making it less useful than a bag with a light-colored interior. Adam Savage agrees.
I’ve got a gothic bike messenger kind of thing going on, so I usually opt for black bags, but that doesn’t mean the interior needs to be black. My older Chrome citizen messenger has a black canvas exterior and white vinyl interior, which is one of my favorite material combinations.
2) The bag should not cause damage to the owner’s goods or clothing.
No scratching. A pocket/slot/pouch designed for stowing electronics, for instance, should not require you to do a delicate finger dance to hold zippers and clasps away from vulnerable surfaces.
No snagging. Bags will make contact with your body in some fashion. Even a long-handled, low-hanging tote bag will bounce and rub against your legs. You shouldn’t have to worry about zippers or clasps tearing into your clothing or an ill-placed hook-and-loop strip ripping a layer off of your sweater.
No color bleed. The bag will get wet. Rain. Leaking bottles. Slobbery dogs. Moisture should not cause dyes and inks to bleed onto the bag’s contents nor the owner.
3) The bag should account for not being worn.
The bag will get set down, hung, stowed. Plan for this.
It’s nice when a bag can stand on its own but that’s not always practical. My Topo Designs mountain briefcase does not tend to stand on its own, but it leans well enough, especially when full. And the leather base adds a bit of cushion and water protection.
My Chrome Kadet sling is awkward when not being worn, though it is easy to swing around to the front when sitting on public transit, and it hangs well enough from the backs of chairs at the bar. It is very difficult to hang from a hook, however, which makes bathroom stalls awkward.
4) Use of one compartment should not compromise the use of another compartment.
The best bags allow you to build patterns of use that require little active thought. If I have to store my notebook in the “interior notebook sleeve” on some days and the main compartment on others, I can’t build a routine and there will always be a bit of frustrating friction while using the bag.
Don’t give me a pocket I can’t use if there’s something in an adjacent pocket. Many bags have exterior water bottle pockets that are unusable if the rest of the bag is full. Dumb.
5) The design of handles, straps, and buckles should minimize the risk of snags and accidents.
Bags are for people on the move. A good bag designed for wear should take to the body like a turtle’s shell. Handles, straps, and other snag points should be compressible, stowable, removable, or, at worst, minimal.
A bad bag makes it feel like the city is trying to grab me. Waist straps caught between bus seats. Handles hooked on door knobs. In one particularly embarrassing scene, I managed the spear the handle of a rolling suitcase through with a subway turnstile. Because the handle was not removable, the only way to recover was leaning back over and swiping another subway fare.
As strong and secure as I want my bag to be, this must be balanced with safety. The buckles and other devices used to secure the bag to my body should be easily operable with one hand and minimal strength in case of injury or emergency. You should always be able to escape your bag if someone else grabs hold of it.
6) The bag should bend before it breaks.
Standard plastic grocery bags, while environmentally awful, do a good job of providing tactile feedback about their capacity. When the clerk hands me the bag, I can tell whether or not it will survive the walk home. Soft plastic stretches and slips in the hand before it breaks. Contrast that with the hard plastic swivel buckle that failed on the strap of a messenger bag I had. It didn’t stretch, groan, bend, or even squeak before failure: it simply popped apart under heavy load, nearly smashing my laptop onto the sidewalk.
It’s unreasonable to expect every bag to be military grade and unbreakable, especially when making trade-offs for weight or compressibility. Whatever the capabilities, though, the bag should communicate them to you. Think of a cardboard box: the bottom will typically start to sag and dip before the contents rip through, giving you a chance to shift your grip before that deep dish pizza gets donated to the pigeons.
The worst culprit I’ve found is the polyester mesh often used on the interior of luggage. It’s hard to know whether you’ve overloaded it until it’s too late, at which point the mesh loses its shape for all time. Boo!
7) The appearance of the bag should improve with use.
Most modern luggage looks like shit after one trip through checked baggage. They don’t show you that in the product photos though, do they?
Every secondhand store is piled full of purses, backpacks, and suitcases with plenty of functional life in them that didn’t age well aesthetically. Peeling graphics. Crackling artificial leathers. Unsightly stains and wear marks from the bag attacking itself. All preventable.
This is as much art as science. Natural and/or simple materials, timeless design choices, and minimal patterns and adornments will help.
*** Originally published as List No. 35 of the 7x77 newsletter project.