I would like to complain about something. Lately, I've gotten (or just paged through) a lot of publications with stunning, innovative graphics that were designed by an Art Director who didn't seem to think it was all that important that people be able to read the text. This is a generalization and there are plenty of exceptions. But what I see happening in these days of digital book and magazine design is that designers are sitting there with way too many fancy fonts at their disposal and it's way too easy to flow text in unnatural shapes around illustrations or to put yellow type over a green image background or something. The result is often a lot of showing-off at the expense of legibility.
I have a couple of prejudices here, one being that as (primarily) an author of prose, I want text to be easily readable. Not just readable. Easily readable. Last year I did the foreword for a book and did not see a proof or anything before the book went to press. Asked what I thought of the finished version, I told the editor that I wasn't wild about what his designer had done with my words. The editor said, "I think that section looks great." I allowed as how it did…but it was hard to read. That to me makes the art direction a failure no matter how attractive the pages seem at arm's length.
"No, no," the editor said. "You can read it." And he was right that you could. You can also usually see (to some extent) a drawing that's been printed badly with dropped-out detail and fuzzy linework and maybe even get a sense of what the artist intended. But the point is that you shouldn't have to do that. The material is not being properly-served if you have to work at it. In reproducing artwork, any editor would tell you he or she wants the crispest, cleanest reproduction of the material possible so you can see every microscopic detail the artist put into it —
— and what I'm saying here is that not always but too often, the same respect is not shown to the text. The designer puts "How do I make this page attractive?" ahead of "How do I make this page legible?" To read text, you shouldn't have to squint and put it under an extra-strong light and concentrate hard on it.
Here's another one of my prejudices. If I can't read it easily, it's wrong. I have near-perfect vision. Lately, I sometimes find myself struggling with an article that I've written. It happened with the foreword I recently did for a book. Even though I have 20/20 orbs and even though I kinda already knew what it said, I had trouble reading my own article. Which of course got me to wondering what it's like for someone with poor vision who's coming to this piece cold.
And here's another: There's nothing wrong with black type against a white background. For my book on Jack Kirby, I turned down a couple of Art Directors, one of whom seemed to think there was; that it was "old-fashioned and boring." He wanted to flow the text over and around Jack's drawings and make collages of Kirby figures to frame my paragraphs. I, on the other hand, wanted Jack's art left the way Jack did it and I didn't want the Art Director's design sense (or my words) intruding on what Jack did. You know, it was kind of a book about Jack Kirby.
Ultimately, we did not hire that particular Art Director. I think what he had against black type against white is that people might look at those pages and think about what I was writing instead of about what a brilliant Art Director he was.
At the Comic-Con, I said some of this to a friend of mine in publishing and he agreed it's getting worse. His theory was that it flows from books being designed on computer screens instead of on paper. Said he, "You don't give enough thought to the font size when you're designing on a screen because it's one click to enlarge it on there. Unfortunately, it's not one click when it's printed out as a book or magazine."
This is more or less the end of my complaint for now and I want to emphasize that it isn't this way with every book and every magazine. It may not even be the majority…yet. I just think it's a trend that's got to be nipped in the bud, as the great philosopher Barney Fife would say. I wrote this to throw this thought out there for public perusal and also to remind myself of something. From now on, when I negotiate my fee for writing something, I think I'm going to try negotiating my font, as well — and make them promise not to try layering my text over a picture or graphic. Because while that may look great in InDesign or Pagemaker, it rarely works as well on that old, primitive, non-layered display thing called paper.