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Why Typography Matters -- Especially At The Oscars (freecodecamp.com)
An anonymous reader shares a blog post: There's one thing the Academy possibly didn't consider, or forgot, for this year's winner cards: typography. First, it's legible, you can tell all the letters apart. Second, it's somewhat readable, but the visual weight of "Moonlight" and the producers are equal and blend together. Lastly, even though it is just a winner's card, it's not visually appealing. I think it's fair to say it's objectively bland. That's horrible typography. Of course, anyone could've made the same honest error! You are on television with millions of people around the world watching. You are a little nervous, and you have to read a card. You will most likely read it from top to bottom (visual hierarchy) without questioning whether the card is right. That look on Warren's face was, "This says 'Emma Stone' on it." Faye must've skipped that part and was caught up in the excitement and just blurted out, "La La Land." I don't blame Faye or Warren for this. This was the fault of two entities: whoever was in charge of the design of the winning card (Was it really a design? C'mon), and the unfortunate person who handed them the wrong envelope. A clearly designed card and envelope (don't even get me started on that gold on red envelope) would've prevented this. The blogger, Benjamin Bannister (a creative consultant for old and new media), adds that there were essentially three things wrong with the card in question: Oscars logo need not to be at the top of the card. The category, "Best Acress" was at the bottom, and in small print. And, the winner's name, the main thing that should be read, is the same size as the second line and given equal weight.
Print the category in bold easy to read type on the outside flap of the envelop where the presenter sees it while opening the envelop.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Wrong.
There was a whole backstory of Faye and Warren fighting over who got to read Best Picture. Warren eventually conceded to her; he would open the envelope, and Faye would read the name.
When he looked at the card and started stalling, Faye freaked out that he was going to read the name, so she read it as soon as she was able to see the title.
Give them a tablet to read from. They make this big deal about locked envelopes like they're the nuclear football. So get rid of the paper and you get rid of all those faults in your secrecy chain like printers and designers and whatever. You could send it real time or have one guy who loads the tablets who knows the winners.
Or you could also not give a shit, because who gives a shit.
When I first read the story on the front page of basically every newspaper, my immediate thought was that it was a publicity stunt. Maybe it wasn't, but I know that I - and many of my friends - didn't care about the oscars this year until that story popped up. Whether this was 'fake news' or not, we are most definitely entering a strange new world, where information is more readily available than ever, but more unreliable than ever.
MegaFLICKS FTW in typography failure
Always 20/20.
You have Leftist
The building
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
... Cowboy Neal wins every Oscars category.
Have gnu, will travel.
I loathe blog posts like this.
Well if *I* had been there this wouldn't have happened. I would've used a 20pt Copperplate font in teal green on black with PROPERLY designed text. Big hairy deal - it doesn't matter you popularity grabbing twit. Hindsight is always 20/20 and it's very VERY likely the same events would've played out because an envelope was just blindly handed over and some actors blindly read the card.
Maybe in the future the cards should be blank and the actors just read from the teleprompter!
God people - it's NOT A BIG DEAL. They got the wrong card at an awards ceremony. Nobody died. Nobody tried to cheat somebody else out of an award. The world didn't end. It's a nonsensical award for nonsensical accolades given for nonsensical reasons because it's fun. It's not like an olympic competition or other sports game where actual skills/rules have to come into play or scientific research that can make or break humanity's chances of survival or nature of life.
But hey - I'm sure if we all just followed this blogger's smug self-sense of worth the academy awards could've avoided such a horrible embarrassment... Except of course for memorializing a living person on the "those who died this last year" segment? What font would you use to fix that?
Who. The. Fuck. Cares? ...about some creative designer's opinion on how the fucking cards should have been designed?
"Oh think of the UX!"
Bullshit! C'mon slashdot... slow news day?
... umm, well, uh, ..., you see, ... er ...
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
That's what you get for not using Comic Sans like every decent graphic designer would have. Amateurs.
...can help a lot, but let's keep in mind that there is ALWAYS a better idiot out there.
Really? You can't think of any situations where clear, concise communications are important?
Have gnu, will travel.
It is being reported that Brian Cullinan, who handed out the wrong envelope, was distracted because he was tweeting on his phone despite having been warned not to do so. If this is true, he was negligent, not unfortunate.
I am not a number - I am a free man!
Thanks for sharing
Why we keep talking about typography? It was a really bad design of the card, not an issue of fonts used.
Triggered! #FontSizeMatters
The article makes a very persuasive case, one that I think many of us can apply in our work as well. You don't have to be a graphic designer or work in graphic design to be able to extract these principles and apply them to your profession.
1. Mitigate the chance of error across every step in the process. Build in fail-safes. The media has placed the lion's share of the blame on the PwC accountants, and it's fair to say they were largely responsible ("you had ONE job"). But there are other steps in the process, ways of building in fail-safe mechanisms, as this article demonstrates.
2. Anticipate the impact of human error. Having two accountants, two sets of envelopes, having them memorize the list of winners, is a good thing, but we see here that this failed because when the awards ceremony is live, people might not be as level-headed as they would normally be. There's a lot going on, and the possibility of error as a result of distractions is greater. Ironically, having multiple sets of envelopes is part of the reason why this error occurred, so there must be careful thought toward building the aforementioned redundancy in a way that doesn't inadvertently create additional modes of failure.
3. Good communication design always places the most important piece of information front and center. This is true whether you work in traditional print, or new media design, or user interface design. And the need for effective design is very frequently underestimated or overlooked entirely.
You can argue that this was just an awards ceremony, rich people patting each other on the back, yadda yadda. Fine. But what I'm interested in is how we all can use this event as a learning experience in our own lives.
What the hell is this story. It's like it was summoned here by Bennett Haselton.
This is somewhat adjacent topic. A philosophy professor once told me that one should put much care in choosing syntax for a logic and its mathematical models. If the readers' main problem is hacking through your syntax, you have done him/her and yourself (when you try to read it later) a disservice.
It isn't just choice of fonts. If a subscript in one font means something and a subscript in another font means something else, then you should consider not overloading subscripts with both kinds of information...guess what problem I'm running into now in reading a logic paper.
The message from the Academy was that La La Land would have the votes in a vacuum, but Moonlight had the votes because we live in a society. Stunts and fonts are just a distraction.
The biggest problem is how cards for categories were handled. Procedures were simply flawed in that it became possible for cards for already-announced categories to make their way into later presentations.
If I understand correctly, there are two sets of identical cards, so that whichever side the stage is entered-from, the relevant card can be handed to the presenter as they pass. This procedure is flawed. It does not automatically deprecate out a card when that card is used.
There are several ways to correct this procedure. Easiest method is to simply provide the cards to the presenters at a single controlled point, and to collect the spent cards from the presenters at another controlled point. To do this then all presenters either need to enter the stage from the same side, or else the cards need to be given to the presenters at a common place that all presenters must pass through prior to getting backstage to pick which side they enter from. If the Academy wants to prevent anyone from opening the cards between this common handout point and the stage, then they need to provide security or escort from that point to the wings of the stage. If the presenters are able to leave by either side, the escorts take the card and deposit it into a locked box similarly to how ballots are collected, where the card is slid into the box and can't be retrieved without cutting the zip-tie. This prevents casual accidental return of the used card back to the source. It would be simple enough to use this egress method at both sides of the stage, such that it doesn't really matter how they leave, the cards are collected and securely taken out of circulation.
Typography wouldn't really matter if this was done properly.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
What was really clumsy was the correction. Once the error was discovered the producers and stage managers should have admitted the mistake and seated the people from La La Land. Once the stage was cleared, then Warren and Faye should have been given the correct envelope and announced the winner. The way they did it really diminished the excitement for the actual winner.
As has Elvis
There's some famous quote about CS having two hard problems: naming things, and cache-invalidation functions. This is an example of getting a cache-invalidation function wrong.
By formatting the card foolishly, the announcers used a bad cache value (they read quickly, saw a movie title and concluded that the movie title was the desired value) instead of doing the more expensive thing (saying "Oops, cache miss. We have the best actress card here but we need the best picture one"). Font and layout geeks are telling us that the cache could have been correctly invalidated, by using the things that (within their art) are obvious common sense. "This is easy to do right!" they are screaming.
Are you sure that you are not actually seeing this very problem in everything you ever work on? Might not a sufficiently-stoned person realize that this is the essense of every logic gate in the infinitely-dimensional fractal tree of reality? (And might he also say, that by being clear about what level of abstraction you're working at, you may also see how to correctly name things?)
People geek out on things. Yes, those people geek out on Oscars, which is silly. Silly to you, [here I use my Great! Acting! Talent! to make a sneer appear on my face before I dramatically recite the next word in my speech] nerd!
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
Size doesn't matter. It's about the motion in the serifs.
The envelope should have the category written in type so big the audience could read it.
Big enough for blind senile old geezers, that don't want to show they need reading glasses, can read it.
Having it in a tasteful, elegant look is arrogant and does not serve the purpose.
Well things like this are bad and good. Good because of all the free marketing they got, bad because it was not the kind of marketing they wanted.
It lives on in each award show for this year, now the standing joke will be to give the main top award to La La Land...
But really, what about color coding the top card to Gold. I know you can't color each different category, then you would have to remember what the color means, but at least the Top award should be a different color than the rest.
And yes, the type and size of the text inside the card should have been designed differently. And the presenters should have been informed and planned for what would happen in the "wrong card situations".
Just saying, the sewage from a bunch of out-of-touch elitists has never really interested myself or a lot my fellow kind.
Front and back should have the category embossed in high contrast color to the background color. The readers shouldn't need to open the card to read the category their announcing the winner.
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell
This has been gone over quite a bit in the past few days.
1) The Academy, not PwC, designed the cards (or contracted out the design). They used a different design house than in years past, ostensibly for cost reasons, but my suspicion is that someone higher up pulled some strings to get a new designer for whatever reason.
2) The #1 issue with the new design is not the typography, which is an issue...it's the contrast. The old design had gold envelopes with black lettering. Why is that important? So you can clearly see the lettering backstage where it may (or may not) be dark. In that way, the accountants might have been more easily able to see the lettering on their envelopes and more quickly corrected the situation. It's still their fault, but the Academy shares some of the blame, because they were more concerned with things like "How will this sexy envelope look when it's opened on TV" rather than "How easily are people able to read the outside of this envelope under pressure backstage."
I dunno, I never taken any of these classes and haven't looked to see if such are available. I learned in early days of "publishing" in 1990s when a friend gave me the book "The PC is not a typewriter" by Robin Williams (not the comedian). This person has done publishing from linotype machines to desktop systems. One thing I learned from him is use minimum types of fonts so your publications don't look like ransom notes (the kind where sentences are formed from cutting out letters from various magazines and glued to a piece of paper).
mfwright@batnet.com
The failure here isn't mostly that a card was designed wrong - that could happen for anyone briefly given the task of designing and printing up cards.
The travesty is that a company that is presumably being paid MILLIONS of $ to do this job, was skating by with non-thinking process and doing deliberate testing and rethinking of the card design. They got lazy and assumed that every year, nothing goes wrong, so we don't need to be checking or improving what we do. (with regard to the actual big night's event, not saying there's not other work that goes into it)
If something is that important, imagine what you should do to make it as bulletproof as possible - like you're designing cards that hold the nuclear launch codes upon which millions of lives depend. You would create a design and testing process that:
- tested what would happen if some element of the card delivery / reading chain failed or was accidentally broken
- tested different card typography and layout designs
- tested the kinds of people who would be involved in delivering and reading the cards (e.g. blind people, old people, nearsighted people, drunk people, anyone who you'd likely encounter on the night)
- etc, etc, etc.
They got by for years without being rigorous about this part of their job, and this time it bit them in the ass. Don't get complacent.
Design is a lost art. There was a time when IBM agonized over the color of the border of active windows on their GUI. Active windows have to be instantly recognized as such but not have too awfully loud a color as to be fatiguing. They did studies about color, perception, and their impact on workflow. Nowadays we get abysmal contrast and everything is flattened into a big game of hide-n-seek to find the active controls on a web-page or app.
I need stable serifs, not some unhinged wavy orange abortion. #NotMyTypeface
It's about movies
Not about your agenda
you stupid moron
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Instead of trying to blame the whole fiasco on the PWC goons (who did fuck up, no doubt here), fire that idiot that designed those cards instead. This is simply beyond dumb.
But lemme guess. "Oh, who's gonna see the cards anyway, no need to hire a professional. My secretary can do that on our trip to the ceremony."
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Your procedure advocates eliminating backup and redundancy.
I do not think that is a good basic starting point for a secure AND failure-resistant procedure.
Captcha: copies
Moron and stupid
Mean the same thing, you know.
Don't be redundant.
I used to think typography didn't matter. Then I saw this:
https://s-media-cache-ak0.pini...
Problem solved. Unless you have presenters who are up multiple times or can't remember their names.
It won the GNAA Best Picture award, hands down.
I though about this for three minutes, when I discovered all the shit dripping off the fan the morning after.
A simple photograph (or gallery) of person (or people) expected to mount the stage would be the best sanity check. Our visual systems are way better equipped to get a slice of primary this-can't-be-right cognition for a celebrity in the hot light feeling watched by a hundred million people.
Yes, you could still end up with the same visual on two different cards, say an actor or actress nominated in two different categories (e.g. lead/supporting). That would require a rare double mix up.
For director/voice actor they could add the image of one of those spindly little chairs or a microphone. They could also tuck a photo of last year's winner (already holding their damn trophies) at the bottom—or even better, a manic caricature of same.
These would be about right as a cue for LAST YEAR'S winner of same category (drawn in a slightly more minimalist style, with Oscar added):
Caricatures drawn for The New York Review by four artists
Wallace
Kubrick
Shostakovich
(Baring a recount, you have a whole year to book this art before the next gala shindig.)
You would need to use stock images for THIS YEAR'S winner, or you'd risk letting the cat out of the bag. Probably stock images from the actual production (which I'm sure all nominees have available if you ask nicely).
Obviously, the inner staff of whatever agency takes this over in future years prepares a winner card for every nominee in every category, and the newly-scared-shitless MC of final card selection would manually winnow the field—stamping each selected card "official"—and then immediately burning all cards not selected.
Bonus: you also get a one-of-a-kind souvenir for the lucky winner to pass along to favoured family or friend (ideally signed by hand by the caricature artist). There are probably other PR/monetization strategies available in conjunction with this, not that anyone in Hollywood would notice another shake of the purse.
As in: your banner ads SUCK. The number of read/transfer loads that completely break commenting while they load SUCKS! Please eliminate them. I really don't give a damn about this topic anymore. Since the current site dynamics SUCK!
Thank you.
Good eye you have there! I work for the Department of Redundancy Department and we're always looking for smart, talented people to fill our ranks. Would you care to send us your resume? There is no pay; it's all volunteer work.
I wanted to write
"You goddamn, fucking idiot"
But that was too long
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
that people make mistakes. It happens. Would be nice if we could just relax, it wasn't a NASA launch or anything. Don't need to get the process engineers and managers coming out of the woodwork to figure out how to make the system 'more resilient'...
http://dilbert.com/strip/1996-08-24
Lawyers must love you. "I can lie any way I want to because the meaning of words changes."
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
it definitely does mean mean "figuratively" either
Should be:
it definitely does not mean "figuratively" either
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
Problem solved, we're no longer letting Serifs into this country.
You mean, we will be Sans Serifs?
is what did steve harvey in, in 2015.
One is a noun
The other is an adjective
Type mismatch - bailing
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
You are one syllable short on line 2.