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.

Comments

Create multiple barriers to failure

[Registered Coward v2]

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.

Re:Create multiple barriers to failure

[CaptainDork]

Splash it on a big screen and let the audience read the answer in unison like on Family Feud.

" Faye must've skipped that part"

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:" Faye must've skipped that part"

[Anonymous Coward]

Plus - Warren had apparently presented two times before, had a rough idea what he was looking for; you can see his confusion. Faye apparently had never presented before, had less of an idea what should "look" right. A quick glance at the card, she saw and read the title.

Plus, the category is as the article mentions, in tiny type at the bottom of the card. Presumably both these old fogies were not wearing their reading glasses. (76 and 80 years old) The category may have been the least readable part of the card, as well as not being prominent.

Another point was the envelope exterior had the category as gold foil on deep red, rather than the traditional deep red on gold... Making the category even less readable on the outside, assisting in the mix-up.

Good advice to apply in practice

[wickerprints]

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.

Why Anything Matters

[Cajun Hell]

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!

Re:it is design not typography

[lastman71]

Because: Typography is the art and technique of arranging type to make written language legible, readable, and appealing when displayed (from Wikipedia).