Though I don't engage in much of it these days, for many years I was heavily involved in graphic design for print. Though by no stretch of the imagination was I a Neville Brody or a Milton Glaser or a Paul Rand or a Saul Bass or any other such person, I'd like to think that I half way knew what I was doing. And in the process - and without acting like a diva - I collected quite a cache of graphic design pet peeves. With your kind permission, a few of these I will now disclose ... but only a few:
Leading, Kerning, Yearning - When it's 5,000 words that need to be typed, it's too herculean a task to attempt to adjust leading and kerning in any other way than a blanket effort. But headlines and texty logos really deserve a bit of tender loving care. Using default is reserved for 2nd graders with Macs in their classroom.
Marginal Ignorance - The meaty, magical software which makes creating all things print doesn't have friendly features which make maintaining proper margins for no reason. Maintain proper margins! Do it! Don't have that paragraph 1 pica away from the left edge of the workspace but 1.5 picas away from the right. Don't do it!
Meaninglessly Multitudinous Typefaces - Just because the typeface palette in your desktop publishing software features beacoup typefaces doesn't mean you should try to use as many as possible in a project! End result: Something that screams "amateur" ... or, even worse, "this design is the result of an experiment in which a chimp was given access to a personal computer".
All Caps Times Roman - Long I tried to understand how someone who had pushed down the caps lock and typed all the copy in the default face could then walk away from the project completely satisfied with his effort. And then one day I was watching a scifi-themed major motion picture. There in the 25th century was an interactive view screen displaying various bits of information entirely in, alas!, all caps Times Roman. I stopped trying to understand.
Comic Sans - When there are roughly eleventy thousand other fonts out there, WHY?!
Jerks - Never assume that you're at the peak of your game and there's nothing left for you to learn. That makes you a diva. And unless you can sing opera, that's a bad thing.
And that's enough of that rant. Tomorrow we return to our regularly scheduled programming.
