![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Graphic design pet peeves.
Jan. 8th, 2008 04:01 pmOf all the production artists in the office, I'm fairly certain that I'm the only one that majored in art. The art directors are all former art students, but most of the production artists studied something other than art.
In art school, I studied just about everything, it was encouraged after all. Offset printing, computer graphics, painting, graphic design, before I finally settled on graphic design as my major. I was studying graphic design in that mutable time when computers were just becoming widely used in the field, but most people still needed a solid understanding of doing it all by hand to get work in the field. But whether we were putting our stuff together by hand or on the computer, it was well drilled into all the students that there are right ways and wrong ways to physically put together a piece. No matter how a student put together a piece, it mattered how the file was constructed. Hell, we even got graded on it. Adding on top of that the fact that I also took a year of typography (and typographers are a special kind of anal), I have some extremely strong design pet peeves, most of which are type related, about how people at work are putting together their ads.
There are a lot of things that both the production artists and the ADs do that drive me crazy. Doing things like adding carriage returns at the beginning of a block of text in order to move the top line into place instead of just moving the text block itself to where you need it to be makes me grit my teeth. Adding runaround settings to invisible boxes instead of creating a text box to the shape you want will elicit a "GRRRRRRRR!"as it forces me when I have to work on updates to those ads to hunt down these damned invisible objects and delete them because they're doing things to the copy flow that I don't want it doing.
Toward the top of the chart is when someone uses 20 different text blocks when they only need one. Why would anyone create a text block for every different copy element in a single column ad? They'll have one text block for a title, then another one for a sub, then yet another one for body copy, and it will start all over again for the next section. Not only did the person who put that ad together create unnecessary work for themselves, they've made unnecessary work for me if I have to either resize that ad or edit the copy.
But, really, the pet peeve to beat all my graphic design-related pet peeves is when someone horizontally scales copy.
Now, I know that there are times when that's done to achieve a particular look. I get that, but I'm not talking about those instances. What I'm talking about is when it's done to body copy, particularly when it's done selectively, as in an entire paragraph will be horizontally scaled, but the one directly below it won't be, and that shit is noticeable! And often it's being done when there is the option of using a condensed type. Why the hell would someone scale Avant Garde to 75% when there is an Avant Garde Condensed available that will work just as well, if not better, will most certainly look better and be significantly more readable?
Everyone who does this does it because of space considerations. But they go right to it instead of first trying other, less ugly options. Why not just reduce the copy size by half a freakin' point? Unless you're talking very small type, the size difference isn't that noticeable and it can create a surprising amount of extra space, oftentimes enough so that there is *gasp* white space, precious white space. Or, and this is a novel idea, contact the client and talk them into going with a bigger ad. Much of the time, they go for it, because if the artist working on their ad tells them that the size they've requested won't look good, they will happily approve a size change. Occasionally there is a size limitation, but that isn't the case often enough that picking up the phone and requesting the change isn't worth a shot. Or, adjust the leading, tracking or hyphenations. Anything before resorting to horizontal scaling. I swear, every single time I work on an ad where the previous artist has horizontally scaled the type in order to gain extra space, I reset the type to 100% scale, then adjust the leading or tracking, and every damn the time, it works perfectly at giving me that extra space, and I have an ad with at least decent looking type.
Don't even get me started on gradient abuse.
In art school, I studied just about everything, it was encouraged after all. Offset printing, computer graphics, painting, graphic design, before I finally settled on graphic design as my major. I was studying graphic design in that mutable time when computers were just becoming widely used in the field, but most people still needed a solid understanding of doing it all by hand to get work in the field. But whether we were putting our stuff together by hand or on the computer, it was well drilled into all the students that there are right ways and wrong ways to physically put together a piece. No matter how a student put together a piece, it mattered how the file was constructed. Hell, we even got graded on it. Adding on top of that the fact that I also took a year of typography (and typographers are a special kind of anal), I have some extremely strong design pet peeves, most of which are type related, about how people at work are putting together their ads.
There are a lot of things that both the production artists and the ADs do that drive me crazy. Doing things like adding carriage returns at the beginning of a block of text in order to move the top line into place instead of just moving the text block itself to where you need it to be makes me grit my teeth. Adding runaround settings to invisible boxes instead of creating a text box to the shape you want will elicit a "GRRRRRRRR!"as it forces me when I have to work on updates to those ads to hunt down these damned invisible objects and delete them because they're doing things to the copy flow that I don't want it doing.
Toward the top of the chart is when someone uses 20 different text blocks when they only need one. Why would anyone create a text block for every different copy element in a single column ad? They'll have one text block for a title, then another one for a sub, then yet another one for body copy, and it will start all over again for the next section. Not only did the person who put that ad together create unnecessary work for themselves, they've made unnecessary work for me if I have to either resize that ad or edit the copy.
But, really, the pet peeve to beat all my graphic design-related pet peeves is when someone horizontally scales copy.
Now, I know that there are times when that's done to achieve a particular look. I get that, but I'm not talking about those instances. What I'm talking about is when it's done to body copy, particularly when it's done selectively, as in an entire paragraph will be horizontally scaled, but the one directly below it won't be, and that shit is noticeable! And often it's being done when there is the option of using a condensed type. Why the hell would someone scale Avant Garde to 75% when there is an Avant Garde Condensed available that will work just as well, if not better, will most certainly look better and be significantly more readable?
Everyone who does this does it because of space considerations. But they go right to it instead of first trying other, less ugly options. Why not just reduce the copy size by half a freakin' point? Unless you're talking very small type, the size difference isn't that noticeable and it can create a surprising amount of extra space, oftentimes enough so that there is *gasp* white space, precious white space. Or, and this is a novel idea, contact the client and talk them into going with a bigger ad. Much of the time, they go for it, because if the artist working on their ad tells them that the size they've requested won't look good, they will happily approve a size change. Occasionally there is a size limitation, but that isn't the case often enough that picking up the phone and requesting the change isn't worth a shot. Or, adjust the leading, tracking or hyphenations. Anything before resorting to horizontal scaling. I swear, every single time I work on an ad where the previous artist has horizontally scaled the type in order to gain extra space, I reset the type to 100% scale, then adjust the leading or tracking, and every damn the time, it works perfectly at giving me that extra space, and I have an ad with at least decent looking type.
Don't even get me started on gradient abuse.
