Tragic Design Accident
Ideally, the visual for the "Predator" movie poster should not scream, "If it bleeds...we'll do our best to beat it to death with a copy of the Preppy Handbook."
Yup! pic.twitter.com/a9o7j72d4Z
— ThatAmericanSpooper! (@AmericanSlack3r) October 21, 2017
Thought I'm not a designer, I think a lot about good design because it helps me come up with the right words and concepts for things I'm writing -- and also to suck less when I'm forced to sort of design something. (I pay professionals whenever possible.)
Two wonderful books on design that are great especially for non-designers are by book cover designer (and graphic artist) Chip Kidd. One is Go. The other is Judge this.
I've read both and both helped me. They're also a lot of fun to read and they give examples of shitty and great design and explain what makes them shitty or great. "Judge this" explains, with examples, where to put the line between the mystery and clarity.
See some of Chip Kidd's book covers here.
Oh, and I love how -- in "Judge this." -- Kidd abandons the ridiculous convention of capital letters on all words in a title. Everyone sticks to this convention, and it's not a good thing. All caps are hard to read.
I fought hard to have the subtitle in lowercase one "I SEE RUDE PEOPLE: One woman's battle to beat some manners into impolite society" -- as it is here.
The standard would have been: "I SEE RUDE PEOPLE: One Woman's Battle to Beat Some Manners into Impolite Society." Bad. Hard to read. Your eye has to go up-down-up-down. I don't want you to work that hard. Besides, the subtitle is more of an explanation than a title. (I wish people would think about that.)
Also, consider another standard -- the standard of writing titles and subtitles in (mostly) caps but with "unimportant" words like "and" in lowercase. The upsy downsy of some words here and there is disturbing. Inconsistent and weird. Why is it done that way? Maybe just because it's been done that way -- which, by the way, is not a good enough reason.
Another designer whose work I love is the late Tibor Kalman. I actually shot photostats for him sometimes on the weekends, back when I worked at the Stat Store on Fifth Avenue and 19th Street, when I did my final year of college at NYU.
Speaking of design, Gregg is posting my new book (the cover and a link) and moving stuff around. In the process, the Amazon and B&N type and a few other things got messed up and ended up huge. He'll fix these and I'll also post about my new book.
I'm doing a medical care expose, and it's been consuming. (I thought I'd have a vacation from "consuming" after I finished "Unf*ckology," but I was apparently wrong.) Tried to hit a few other people up to write this thing -- two of whom graduated med school -- but they were too smart to bite. (And also busy with their own work.)
Amy Alkon at October 21, 2017 11:32 AM
There was a small "graphics for non-designers" book that introduced the C.R.A.P. approach - the 4 principles of graphic design being:
Contrast
Repetition
Alignment
Proximity
Google "crap design" for tons of web pages explaining these ideas.
It works too - at least at the basic level of cleaning up fonts and layout of non-designed documents.
Ben David at October 21, 2017 12:59 PM
I ain't got time to bleed.
I R A Darth Aggie at October 21, 2017 2:47 PM
I dislike the President of the United States... Personally, politically, in just about every way.
this is nonetheless overwrought:
The terms seem somewhat uncertain. It's more correct, and more probable, to say that Donald Trump was shown to have, a decade earlier, spoken like a pathetic, needy and inept braggart.
(Is it possible a lot of women who voted for him have seen men behave that way before?)
And ten years ago, this middling, multiply-bankrupted TV performer certainly had less power than the governor of a near-southern state, also destined for the White House.
Has anyone even heard an accusation, or even a rumer, that this celebrity-of-thirty-years has raped anyone? Perhaps you have; perhaps I've been too removed from the news to hear of a Weinstein-style pattern of assualts. (Trump's married and impregnated three women, which is plenty cruel enough.)
Passages such as "America still elected his ass" don't illuminate us through irony, but suggest that our author wants to make social distance from an enormous number of people without engaging them to consider they're thinking theretofore... But it's a safe bet that those Americans don't want talk to our author anyway.
But it gets worse:
Caitlin Flannagan and many others say things like that, too. I don't like it. What do they mean, exactly, by "believe"? Exactly what social or *legal* mechanisms do they want to set in motion by such rhetoric?
They never say. I think they want to keep their options open.
I think we shouldn't let them. I think there's been little new crawling under the sun since the establishment of American jurisprudence, and we should work with what's at hand.
Credibility is not a new consideration.
Crid at October 21, 2017 4:12 PM
Wrong thread. I feel bad.
crid at October 21, 2017 6:18 PM
Also, their there they're.
Crid at October 21, 2017 8:49 PM
Also misspelled rumor, and an extra comma in the fifth graph.
Also, Moynihan has clear thoughts about people who are afraid of normalizing the Trump presidency here:
http://fifthcolumn.podbean.com/mf/feed/5hquwr/October_19th_2017_e78.mp3
Crid at October 21, 2017 9:05 PM
I will check out Chip Kidd.
My design peeve -- and I'm nearly Rain Man about it -- is fonts, particularly in period pieces. It drives me crazy in movies and television shows when fonts aren't period-accurate, particularly when a production is scrupulous about every other period detail.
When a newspaper, billboard or document in a movie uses a font that didn't exist at the time, or was obviously created by computer with technology that had yet to be invented, it takes me right out of the piece.
LIke I said: Rain Man.
Kevin at October 22, 2017 11:29 AM
here you go kevin
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVhlJNJopOQ
lujlp at October 22, 2017 12:28 PM
This look like a poster for a Rom-Com in which the Predator has decide between Carl Weathers and Arnold Schwarzenneger.
L. Beau Macaroni at October 22, 2017 2:29 PM
Thank you, lujlp! That was hilarious (and accurate).
Kevin at October 22, 2017 8:50 PM
There used to be a Web site called forkinthehead.com that offered both accurate and hilarious comment on badly designed Web pages. It's long gone now, and unfortunately, they had a robots.txt that prevented the Wayback Machine from crawling their site, so there is no archive that I've been able to find.
Cousin Dave at October 23, 2017 7:18 AM
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