Slide 11
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Reading Design
I spent a few semesters teaching typography at an institute of art and design. My classes began
on the first day with a short quiz asking students—at that stage three years into a
communications design degree—to draw some basic symbols such as an ampersand and an
apostrophe, and to mark suggestions for typographic improvements to some fairly shabby copy
I’d written.
Term after term I’d go over the tests and scratch my head wondering what they’d been up to the
past three years. With due respect to my colleagues in the program—many of whom taught in
addition to running corporate design shops or ad agencies—the education had plainly focused
away from what I consider the primary goal of communication design: to make vital, engaging
work intended above all to be read. To use design to communicate.
To the students, text had been handled as a graphic element, to be shifted within grids,
manipulated and filtered like a photo, to be squinted at and scrutinized upon critique but never
apparently to be read.
“But editors take care of text, we just have to design it” was the response when I’d insist that
designers learn about editorial style and usage, which always made me laugh.
I complain about the cult of designer ego because it takes away from the craft mentality that
leads to better work. The cult of editorial ego is another matter altogether: surrounded as we are
by stilted prose, overstatement and eye–glazing textual banality, text has no more implicit safety
in the hands of editors.
That said, there are talents and hacks on both sides of the barbed wire and landmines that lie
between editors and designers, none of whom benefit from ignorance of what the other side is
doing. If you design with editors, study what they know, and have the same reference books at
hand.
And above all, read what you are designing, and imagine reading it for the first time, like
someone who just found it.
Excerpt from Reading Design by Dean Allen. Published November 2001 in A List Apart, Issue
128.
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