noise to signal

A designer's eye

I picked up a brochure on the bus the other day called "keeping our transit system safe". Here's one of the headings from the brochure:

I was showing this brochure to Miz Becky that evening and laughing at how sloppy the designer and printer had been. "What do you mean?" she asked.

I pointed out the tell-tale hairline of white on the left edge of the letters:

I explained that that meant that the designer didn't "trap" the type, or make sure it overlapped the yellow background slightly. Worse, the printer didn't know to do it either.

The problem is that if you depend on precise registration, when the plate inevitably shifts or stretches a little bit on the press, it will leave these little hairlines of white -- or sometimes larger white gaps that are visible to a normal human being.

That exhange got me thinking about how important it is for a designer to have a good eye and attention to detail.

A story on the subject of having a good eye: Several years ago I was flipping through a design magazine -- I think it was Publish or Print -- and I opened to a two page spread. On the left side there were two tiny dots. "That's odd," I thought, "I wonder why one of them is larger than the other."

Then I looked at the other page of the spread, where I saw this headline: "Introducing the monitor for those of you who can tell that the dot on the right is .000765 inches larger than the dot on the left."

"Oh crap," I thought. "I'm a target market."

I've since discussed this event with other designers, and the consensus is that this isn't that odd of an experience for people in our weird profession. Part of the reason we do this job is because we can't help but see that the fourth "e" over is kerned badly, and we can't stand it. We're compelled to fix it.

A related part of being a good designer is attention to detail. Again, an illustrative story: About 9 years ago I needed to hire a contractor to do some art production work for me. I gave both people the agency sent over the same test: I asked them to reproduce a complex piece of art for me from a printed example -- something I had done a couple of weeks earlier because an electronic version of this piece of art no longer existed.

I also made sure to give them far too little time to complete the task. Not because I'm evil -- I am -- but because I wasn't really interested in seeing them complete the task. I wanted to see how they approached the task.

One of the people had put many more boxes down on the page, but they were all "roughed in": different sizes and in approximate locations.

The other person had only put down a few boxes, but they had a careful system of grid lines laid down, all measured off of the graphic (I had made sure to leave a pica ruler casually lying around on the other desk in the office).

The second person had clearly thought through the graphic, figured out what was needed to reproduce it accurately, measured it out, and was proceeding in a careful and precise manner. They got the job.

It's that obsessive attitude towards visual issues that I think is one of the defining characteristics of a good designer. In many ways, we don't "do design", we are designers. We can't help it.