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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.
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?
As I told my son after he fried my laptop a couple of days ago (plugged the power cable into a USB slot because he wasn't paying attention), it's not whether you make a mistake or not, it's whether you learn from it. In my son's case, it's "pay attention when plugging in electrical devices." In PwC's case, it might be "don't tweet while handing the envelopes out" or "design the envelopes/cards to more easily convey their information."
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Why we keep talking about typography? It was a really bad design of the card, not an issue of fonts used.
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.
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
Who. The. Fuck. Cares.
A mistake was made about a contest between films for a nebulous "best picture" award that means absolutely nothing when no one is going to remember the name of the winner in 10 years because almost no one saw the film.
Trump's speech this week had more viewers. They need to do something especially when they give the biggest award to a terrible movie just to be PC. The top review on IMDb for it has four stars. That doesn't deserve best picture award.
Remember last year when they just gave nominations to good shows and performances and the racists got all in people's faces about how unfair that was? So now in over reaction the Oscars gave Best Picture to a movie that few will ever see. Think about how much your life has been impacted by the Oscar goof this year (meaning announcing the wrong winner, not the goof of giving it to Moonlighting in an act of appeasement) and you'll eventually realize that if the awards no longer matter then the cards that the winners are written on don't matter either.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Since the word has literally changed meanings, it seems to me that you can now use it literally or figuratively. There is literally no reason to abandon it.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.