Wednesday, August 13, 2008
Thank Goodness that someone else has come out to say it. Jakob Nielson is not the guru he’s cracked up to be. Hank Williams has pointed out in a post at Why Does Everything Suck?[^1] that this particular bit of triteness is “unreadable.” And it is. Do you notice how there are no paragraph indentations? Do you notice how the leading is not adjusted to the height of the font? All the man does is try to dictate conventions and yet he literally dismisses print conventions that have been around for hundreds of years. Read more…
Friday, February 22, 2008
One of the effects of design in media is its ability to underscore or derail a message. And that’s an important fact for a presidential candidate (or their campaign materials designer) to take into consideration. I mean, despite its at-first-glance solidity and structure, you wouldn’t want to end up using a font (Trajan) that for the most part these days, is totally associated with horror movies. Conscious or not, there’s an underlying aesthetic appeal built in the color and font and graphic choices of the candidates. In fact, I personally believe that the savviness of the campaign materials probably says a lot about a candidate’s lack of a tendency to micromanage. Bad design decisions are far more likely the fault of overly-fussy and uninformed clients then they are designers. So, who’s looking savvy for 2008 anyway?
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