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As a Kindle fanatic, I look forward to never again having to heft a 700-page tome with tiny type for the privilege of being able to read one page at a time.
However, I do take two print newspapers a day—The Philadelphia Inquirer and The New York Times—because I like something with my morning coffee to read (and do an occasional crossword), so I don't have to start the day staring at a computer screen.
It seems to me that the current mantra among the oh-so-hip and with-it 20-somethings—who get their news exclusively from the Internet and Jon Stewart—is that print is dead and the old rules of print no longer apply.
Print is emphatically NOT dead. And the old rules do indeed apply.
Recently, I bought a box of A&P's America's Choice dried scalloped potatoes, and the cooking instructions—shown at right—were in unreadable white sans serif mouse type in all caps reversed out of a pink background. The design choice was poor, and apparently whoever signed off on it was not aware of the rules of print.
"The King's Speech"
My wife Peggy and I went to see this Oscar-worthy film that was magnificent in every aspect but one: The onscreen type was unreadable. Admittedly, I have lousy 20/400+ eyesight. So at the end of the film, when the line of mouse type stretched across the screen telling us that King George VI (Colin Firth) conferred upon his speech therapist (Geoffrey Rush) the order of something-or-other, I could not read it—nor the credits, nor any of the other follow-up information.
Trouble is, when "The King's Speech" goes to DVD and streaming Netflix, this type will look like mouse droppings on TV screens all over the world.
The Website Design Disaster
Recently I acquired a client with an Internet and iPhone App service. When I saw his website, I started asking questions such as:
- Why are there long paragraphs of white type reversed out of a blue background?
- Why are there long paragraphs of light gray mouse type?
- Why are the headlines in pale blue?
His computer guru came back at me with a huffy response: "We're contemporary, and this is contemporary Web design."
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