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Saturday, September 12, 2009
The Size of Things
A Short Essay on Design
Graphic Designers notice things; they have been trained to. They notice type faces on posters and colors on packaging, and they also notice something that most people don’t typically consider: they notice size.
When a Graphic Designer reads a printed paper set in 12 pt. font, the words look heavy and awkward on the page—too big for body copy—while a 9.5 pt. Garamond produces a contented sigh. A tiny image loses its impact when swimming in the sea of a giant t-shirt, but a too-big graphic becomes annoying. The size of things matters, and when a thing’s size doesn’t match its meaning, the message becomes confused—the design equivalent of spending 10 seconds of a film on an actor’s elbow, while passing quickly over a significant scene.
The role size plays in design may seem obvious, but it becomes confusing when things like placement and function come into the mix. A tiny word, for instance, centered on a large, empty page, makes a bigger impact than the same word surrounded by a paragraph. And if a form’s message is enhanced by its being smaller, it won’t necessarily lose its significance in a large layout.
In his book Horton Hears a Who, Dr. Seuss emphasizes this point with the tiny community of Whos that resides on a dust speck. The fact that the Whos are microscopically small is the driving force behind a plot that includes everything from elephants to hundred-mile fields of clover. Any bigger, and the Whos would lose their relevancy: their tiny size in relation to their surroundings is what makes them stand out.
When designers think about size, they take into account all of these considerations and weigh them against the constraints of format, readability, and available means. Even a good design is a bad design if it’s not plausibly constructed and accessible to users. Sometimes a seemingly less-than-ideal solution is really the best one for a given situation.
So next time you are reading your cereal box or casually glance at an advertisement for your local farmer’s market, you probably won’t be thinking about font size or the comparative relevancy of ideas portrayed in a layout—but, then, that’s the point. You’re not supposed to notice. But designers notice. They are noticing, and they are probably critiquing.
Graphic Designers notice things; they have been trained to. They notice type faces on posters and colors on packaging, and they also notice something that most people don’t typically consider: they notice size.
When a Graphic Designer reads a printed paper set in 12 pt. font, the words look heavy and awkward on the page—too big for body copy—while a 9.5 pt. Garamond produces a contented sigh. A tiny image loses its impact when swimming in the sea of a giant t-shirt, but a too-big graphic becomes annoying. The size of things matters, and when a thing’s size doesn’t match its meaning, the message becomes confused—the design equivalent of spending 10 seconds of a film on an actor’s elbow, while passing quickly over a significant scene.
The role size plays in design may seem obvious, but it becomes confusing when things like placement and function come into the mix. A tiny word, for instance, centered on a large, empty page, makes a bigger impact than the same word surrounded by a paragraph. And if a form’s message is enhanced by its being smaller, it won’t necessarily lose its significance in a large layout.
In his book Horton Hears a Who, Dr. Seuss emphasizes this point with the tiny community of Whos that resides on a dust speck. The fact that the Whos are microscopically small is the driving force behind a plot that includes everything from elephants to hundred-mile fields of clover. Any bigger, and the Whos would lose their relevancy: their tiny size in relation to their surroundings is what makes them stand out.
When designers think about size, they take into account all of these considerations and weigh them against the constraints of format, readability, and available means. Even a good design is a bad design if it’s not plausibly constructed and accessible to users. Sometimes a seemingly less-than-ideal solution is really the best one for a given situation.
So next time you are reading your cereal box or casually glance at an advertisement for your local farmer’s market, you probably won’t be thinking about font size or the comparative relevancy of ideas portrayed in a layout—but, then, that’s the point. You’re not supposed to notice. But designers notice. They are noticing, and they are probably critiquing.
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