Mixtur Blog

As a designer, I carry around with me an internal list of things that constitute bad design and good design. This is a list that designers ignore at their own peril. Most of the time not holding to this list at least results in jeers from the design community. This explains the wince of pain that designers experience when someone says, “Full justify that text,” or “Make it bigger and red,” or “Try it in Comic Sans.”

However, sometimes the rules get broken and we are left scratching our heads when it still works. So here are three things that have surprised me in the past.

1) Annoying Typefaces

The best way to tell if a poster was made by an amateur or professional designer is to count how many typefaces are used. If it’s more than three, chances are not in favor of a professional. We choose serious type for serious subjects. After all, who wants to read a whole textbook set in Curlz MT? The best thing designers can do is not get in the way of the students absorbing the information. A nice clean typeface and good type hierarchy will do the job.

But that might not be completely true. There was a study done at Princeton University that showed the size and styling of the type in textbooks didn’t help the students remember the content (really students? Do you even know how many character styles where made to bring you all that bold, underlined and italic styling?) What did help them remember was – setting the text in Comic Sans.

Apparently, the harder the text is to read, the more time the students have to spend reading it. So designers are right, expressive typefaces decrease the legibility of the text, but their annoying qualities are also what makes student do better on tests. I did write a 26 page report in middle school which I set in Jockerman, I wonder if my teacher still remembers that report to this day?

2) The Color Orange

Orange is an interesting color. It’s good for accents and is a very popular pairing for blue. It provides some brightness, warmth and energy into the color palette. Selling this color is not hard, it’s not like we’re trying to use purple right?

Well in this study on color associations, they found that orange might turn out to be the most loaded color you could use. For instance, it tests high for association with the word “Fun” just beating out yellow 28% to 26%, but it also just beats out brown for the coveted title of “Least Favorite Color” 30% to 23%. It also takes the cake for being associated with “Cheap / Inexpensive” at 26% with yellow tailing it at 22%. That’s a bit harsh don’t you think? Don’t worry orange, I still like you.

3) Design for the Majority

Every design should solve a problem. One of the tried and true ways to do that is to first define the problem and the target audience. That might as well be written on stone tablets for the Ten Commandments of Graphic Design. To design well and effectively we need to know your average user. Sometimes we even create profiles on fictional people who represent the typical consumer just to make sure we understand the demographic.

So how is this wrong? Well the designers at OXO like to say, “We don’t want to know about your typical customer. We want to know about the fringe customer.” And they are the people who made the crazy popular potato peeler, the OXO Good Grips Swivel Peeler. This was a product designed for arthritics that ended up being extremely popular with everyone. What happened was when the designers looked at the fringe users (elderly with arthritis) they found a design flaw that observing the average user didn’t. The old handle was hard to hold for everyone, but only the fringe group made this impossible to ignore. Once redesigned, the product was easier to use, period.

After all that, maybe we should rethink carving anything in stone.