Art / Design — Stop making the user work, work, work!
When I first started out on my design path, I though font designers and true typographers are amongst the most pinickity in our game.
Kerning, Leading, Tracking, Alignment, Legibility, Ragged edges… all words that make them go weak at the knees.
Sometimes I heard them talk and thought REALLY, do you think anybody other than you cares whether the counter in the centre of an o is a true circle or an oval. 🤯
But the truth is, the further I got down the path, the more I realised, it’s this attention to detail that makes or brakes a what I do. And is the foundation on which the more artistic side of our game can live.
Bad design, due to the lack of these fundamentals, is easy to point out but good design is often skimmed over because… it just works.
Generally, with respect, the audience/user of our output won’t know what makes good design. Truth is, they probably don’t care, they’re only reading our poster, brochure, website etc. because they care about the topic (NOT the design). Our job is to further engage them with the product/topic NOT make them coo over design aesthetics (that’s a welcomed bonus).
That said if — amongst other things — it’s badly laid out, too little contrast is applied to areas of importance, or too much attention is drawn to the ‘bells and whistles’ the user may walk away from our piece uninformed and worse still, confused or disappointed — in which case, we as designers have failed (Hangs head in shame 😔)
Now when I’m throwing down content / beautifully crafted copy, I ask myself:
What is the goal of the passage of text within a layout?
Readability VS Aesthetics
For me… the swing for design is towards readability. The further towards the later, the closer to art it becomes.
My gut wants to produce Aesthetics (art) but my brain tells me the goal is Readability (design) — and so the balancing act begins.
There’s lots of tricks to help here:
- Ebbs and flows of the narrative to keep people hooked and on their toes
- Moments of calm in layout to digest important points
- Clear distinction between sections to help people have a pit stop mid read. (Think half time interval)
- Identifying short reads vs long reads (of the same text)
But one of the simplest, believe it or not, is choosing alignment of text.
All to often I see the wrong choice being made at the wrong time and this is where we lose the viewer/users eye why… because we’re making them work to hard.
They shouldn’t have to work to find the next line, it should just flow. The harder we have their brain thinking about where the next line is, the less they are thinking about the topic (digesting the information) the more we are failing.
For me, it’s simples:
- Longer texts (ie. more that 2 lines), where the goal is ease of reading / retention of information we should be leaning toward left aligned.
- Headlines / Sub heads / short intros, where the intention is to draw someone into a layout using visual trickery (plus of course, clever copywriting), its fair game between centre and left alignment.
- Right alignment — Never, never, never…. oh well go on then 0.00001% of the time but only with extreme caution.
Here’s a couple articles expand the topic further:
https://medium.com/@meetchopz/10-bad-typography-habits-that-scream-amateur-8bac07f9c041
https://uxmovement.com/content/why-you-should-never-center-align-paragraph-text/
https://designshack.net/articles/layouts/how-to-use-centered-alignments-tips-and-examples/
What are your top tips?
