My posts about illegible book designing continue to bring me messages like this one from a gent who asked that I withhold his name…
Regarding your recent posting about book design and illegible type, let me just say that, as a graphic designer myself, the key driver of this trend is the fact that most of my graphic designer peers and colleagues simply do not read. This is purely anecdotal on my part, but I've been in the field for 15 years and I'm personally appalled at the number of graphic designers who not only don't read for pleasure, but they usually don't even read the text which they are laying out. For most of them it's just a textural element whose sole purpose is to add visual interest to a layout.
The biggest offender of this is one of the former superstars of the field named David Carson who was really famous in the 1990s (at least, as famous as most graphic designers are likely to get). He used to work for surfing, skateboarding, and music magazines, and he was chiefly responsible for ushering the grunge type fad that defined much of that decade. I once saw him speak at an AIGA (American Institute of Graphic Arts) event and he spoke of a story that he was once tasked with laying out for one of the magazines he was working for. He didn't like that particular story so he decided to set the type in a "dingbat" font (essentially a decorative pictograms font made up of stars, check marks, boxes, and a variety of other decorative elements). His view (and he was proud of this) was that since he didn't like the story and since he held it in contempt, he was going to make sure no one else could read it either.
This is obviously an extreme example, but the lack of respect that most designers have for the written word in general is very, very real.
On the phone to me the other day, a colleague said that as far as he was concerned, the worst thing that ever happened to book design — and I think he was talking about books relating to comic books — was the success of Chip Kidd. I said I thought Chip's designs were very imaginative and wonderful. The colleague said, "So do I. The trouble is that his success convinced a lot of designers without his skill that they needed to make themselves more important than the book."
I wouldn't blame Kidd but I think that's part of the problem there. On a TV show I worked on, we once had a costume designer who didn't want to read the script or hear what anyone else thought of how the characters should look. She told us she was just going to design whatever she thought looked good — never mind if it fit the story — because all she cared about was winning an Emmy and all the Emmy judges cared about (she insisted) was how the clothes looked, regardless of context.