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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.
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.
...can help a lot, but let's keep in mind that there is ALWAYS a better idiot out there.
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.
The UX stuff is a lot more interesting than the Oscars.
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!
Why we keep talking about typography? It was a really bad design of the card, not an issue of fonts used.
>plugged the power cable into a USB slot because he wasn't paying attention
How??!
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.
A friend of mine has a visual impairment. He isn't totally blind, but needs to be REALLY CLOSE to words in order to make them out. He often writes technical documentation for his job, and implements various design rules to make it easier to find the part you want in his documents. He doesn't have to do it, but it certainly helps him when he needs to refer to the documentation himself in the future.
He would have totally designed this card right the first time. PWC probably just had some low level employee do it.
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.
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
Just saying, the sewage from a bunch of out-of-touch elitists has never really interested myself or a lot my fellow kind.
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.
You'd think at some point a Lenovo engineer would go "This looks kinda like USB. We should make sure it won't fry anything if someone tries to shove it into a USB port."
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.
The USB port is right next to the power port. (This is a 3 year old Toshiba Satellite L-70A.) That USB port had previously lost the little plastic tab that the USB leads usually rest on. My best guess is that my son jammed the round power plug into the rectangular USB hole and one of the USB leads entered the power plug, completing the circuit.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
I loathe blog posts like this.
Good. Please state your name so that I make sure to never employ someone who's not interested in identifying causes and mitigating consequences, learning from mistakes, or who just claims that hindsight is something that isn't worth investigating.