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Important News Alert: A Graphic Designer Did Not Bring Down the Third Reich. That's right. You heard me. False alarm.

There's been a buzz in the air recently over Michael Beirut's shocking exposure of Ernst Bettler as a sham. Bettler, the design legend responsible for creating quite possibly the most important case study ever of graphic design as public advocacy, apparently never existed. Neither did his condemning posters, nor did the company he condemned. The entire story was faked by Christopher Wilson, a writer for the publication Dot Dot Dot.

Michael Beirut painfully exposed our tragic flaw as graphic designers: "...how desperately we designers crave evidence that our work has the capacity to truly make a difference." Wilson's Bettler hoax, complete with N-A-Z-I posters and Anti-Semitic pharmaceutical companies and a corporate scandal that makes Enron seem tame, was so well received by the graphic design community that it ended up in our text books, our journals, and as a muse on our websites and blogs. We really wanted to believe this one. We really want to think we're important.

Beirut, however, in his book 79 Short Essays, has already found his true muse for graphic design as social change: Deborah Adler, the designer of the ClearRx prescription bottle. As graphic designers, we have always been the ugly step children of the design world. Architects and industrial designers have real icon success stories, but graphic designers don't have much to hold up at Show and Tell. So along comes Adler, who designed a new pill bottle that literally saved lives.

The ingenious little 4 inch bottle is a true design gem. The traditional ugly yellow bottle packaging was redesigned to have a flat front, easier to read type, a color-coded ring, and a removable information card. The bottle's also been inverted, so it's easier to grab off the shelf, and easier to dispense. After Adler whipped this thing up, Target, the world's leading design advocate, purchased the design, and they've been using it ever since. It's also been featured in over 50 real publications, like Business Week and New York Magazine.

The contrast between these two stories couldn't be more pronounced. A designer who single-handedly crushed a pharmaceutical juggernaut with his sheer wit, and a college student who realized that her grandparent's pill bottles were tough to use, and went about changing them. We want to believe the Nazi story. It's sexy, provocative. We want to believe that if we really wanted to, we could culture-jam ourselves to a better world. But design isn't always sexy. Often the most effective and life-changing solutions are quiet and reserved. Adler's bottle might not have brought down the Third Reich, but she did manage to make the daily routine of our lives safer and easier.

It's always tough to realize there's no silver bullet, no magic pill. But it is nice to remember that if there ever was a panacea in a pill, we'd have a great bottle to put it in. Isn't that enough to heal our bruised egos?