written August 19th, 2009 · 1 comment

So to finish off what I started earlier…we can begin with this little boo boo. Someone forgot to check his/her reds! It might be difficult to see, but there are different reds used for these two inserts. Oops!

Here the left insert text is set in a smaller type size and with less leading than on the right.

 This I found in a German magazine. The whole magazine was in German, but on only a few fashion spreads there were English descriptions. Strange strange. I know its picky, but was there a reason?

Negative leading:(

Negative letter spacing. Why oh why?

Here the spacing has been totally disregarded. The leading is way off.

 Here the leading is also off. Notice there is more white space between the lines of bold text than regular weight. This could be because of extra leading added or that the typeface has a shorter x-height, which means the designer mixed and matched typefaces for regular and bold faces. This is a bad idea unless you can properly match the x-heights. This is the general rule at least. Your eye is the true tester! And here its not really working.

This is just awful. No no no! Never underline long passages of text especially when the text is already a callout! It makes the text tiresome to read. This callout is also already bold! How much more attention calling do you need to do?

And now for some pretty awful layouts. I don’t know if this magazine was trying to be experimental, but I could think of a lot more attractive and creative layouts than these. There just isn’t any structure. It is one thing to break out of a structure in creative ways, but you have to have a solid grid first. Ooo and the rag on that first paragraph is painful.

I am not digging the small images here. I get that the designer is working with varying column widths and it could work, but in a more funky minimal way, not corny with these photos. This layout is from the same magazine as that above and it bothered me that there was right justified and ragged right columns being used randomly. I guess I like structure, at least the illusion of it. I am not against crazy layouts…but these are not crazy. They are bordering on the designer doesn’t know what he/she is doing level.

This is not too bad. I like the mix of typefaces, but the sizes are off. I have the magazine in front of me now and some of the text is teeny tiny and the main body text is kind of big and clunky looking. But the overall page structure is sound. The top extra wide block of text is definitely extra wide, but ya know…of course I would have done it differently;)

Here are some layouts that I am not completely decided on. I don’t know whether to condemn them or to like them. There seems to be a trend of overlapping images with text as you can see below. It is funky for sure, but leaves the reader in a bit of a funk if they actually want to easily read what is printed in the magazine. I would do it where the images were light enough to avoid illegible text or where the info wasn’t supposed to be read. I think all in all the design in this magazine is just unsettling. Am I a purist? No. I am all for craziness as I have said, but craziness with good typography in mind!

That’s all folks!