There’s this moment at the Oscars, right before La La Land was mistakenly awarded Best
Picture, where you can really tell that whatever Warren Beatty is looking at doesn’t make
sense.
"For Best Picture..."
"You're impossible."
He knew something was wrong, but he wasn’t sure.
But here’s an idea: what if better typography could have prevented this whole snafu?
Let’s walk through what that could have looked like.
We know from this shot that the announcement card looks something like this.
The card is serving two purposes: on one hand, it’s a beautiful souvenir for the winner,
and on the other hand, it’s a cue card for a very high-pressure public presentation.
So how do you make this easier to read in front of 30 million live viewers?
Let’s look at how the card compares to the line that the announcer has to say.
We read things from top to bottom, but at the top is “Oscars”... that’s not useful
information for the people on stage... at the Oscars.
"That’s like a few milliseconds of extra time that those presenters have to go through
when they're presenting, they have to go through all this information.
That’s benjamin bannister, he’s a graphic designer who put together an alternate design
for the announcement card.
"It’s like driving on the side of the road, you literally have a few seconds to read all
the information on the signs, or else you're going to make a wrong turn.”
‘Best Actress’ should be the first thing on the page.
Make it a little easier to read, and now, the presenters have a clear sign that they’ve
got the wrong card.
But this still treats the winner with the same emphasis as the movie they appeared played
in, which, while it’s nice to have, is really just extra context.
You solve that by making the name of the winner the biggest thing on the page.
If the presenters were given this card, one of two things would have happened: their eyes
would have first read “Best Actress,” or “Emma Stone”.
Not La La Land.
You can apply the same fix to the card that prompted Steve Harvey to crown the wrong person
Miss Universe in 2015.
No bad typography, no confusion, no embarrassing mix-up.
The consequences of bad graphic design extend far beyond award shows.
In the fall of 2000, the supervisor of elections for Palm Beach County, Florida was tasked
with designing a ballot with more candidates than could fit on a single column.
It wound up looking like this — it was called a “butterfly ballot” because of the way
the text occupied two columns.
If you were voting for Bush, this form made enough sense — to pick the first candidate,
you punched in the first bubble.
But then, to vote for the second candidate on the list, Al Gore, you had to punch in
the third bubble.
See the problem?
The Palm Beach Post estimated that over 2,800 Gore voters accidentally voted for Pat Buchanan.
"A number of voters here in Palm Beach County have filed lawsuits asking for a new election
because they claim they either voted for the wrong candidate or double punched their ballots
because of confusion over the ballot design."
Bush won Florida by a margin of 537 votes.
Better typography here arguably could have changed US history.
Graphic designer Michael Beirut put together this version of what that ballot could have
looked like.
It uses the same format, but consolidates information horizontally, so that you can
fit all the same candidate names in the same amount of space.
Instead of there being two conflicting visual paths to follow, there’s just one.
There’s also a lesson here for public health.
When it comes to health, there’s probably no single piece of household typographic design
that’s as common as this one: the orange prescription bottle.
These have been around since just after World War II, and they haven’t changed much apart
from the addition of a child-safety cap in the 1970s.
But they’re not the easiest things to read.
Just look at how information is prioritized here.
The pharmacy branding is often the first and biggest thing on the label, which is fairly
unimportant information for the user.
The rest of the text on the label is small, and it’s all the same size and weight.
Even these confusing numbers, which the user doesn’t need at all, get the same amount
of emphasis as everything else.
On top of that, some key warnings are printed on hard-to-read color combinations, like black
on dark red.
Put all of that on a curved bottle that you have to rotate to read, and you’re left
with a pretty unfriendly design.
A design student named Deborah Adler, created a model for what a new and improved
pill bottle could look like.
She called it Clear Rx — she was inspired after her grandmother took her grandfather’s
medicine by accident.
And it’s a common problem.
Experts estimate there are 500,000 cases per year in the U.S. of people misreading prescription
bottle instructions.
In Adler’s design, The branding moves to the bottom, and the most important information
for the user is big at the top.
Adler also included color-coded rings, so that the packaging clearly distinguishes between
users, not just between medications.
The extra surface area on the back allows for space to be dedicated to warnings for
the user.
Target bought this design and rolled it out in 2005 to positive reception.
But 10 years after that, Target sold its pharmacy business to CVS, and the new pill bottle disappeared.
Stories emerged afterward that some users had actually fished their old Target bottles
out of the trash because of how much they liked them.
Others took to Twitter.
CVS has said that it’s developing a new, similar model — but it hasn’t released
it yet.
As with a lot of designs, it’s hard to notice the things that are done well until they aren’t
there anymore.
“I think it was a good moment to show people and educate them on the fact that design does
matter.
And most people seem to forget, and say it’s not a big deal.
Until something like this happens.
Designers are there to prevent things like this from happening.”
So would different typography have totally changed outcomes in any of these cases?
Maybe.
But if you’re Warren Beatty or Steve Harvey or Al Gore — that’s a pretty big “maybe.”