It is quiet important that if we see a text, an advert or an artwork we can understand and don’t get lost in them because they were simply badly designed. Legibility is relevant whenever we do a presentation at work or an essay for school. Although legibility doesn’t mean you can’t experiment and play around a bit with the typefaces, the sizes or the colours.
There are obvious facts; if it’s too small people won’t be able do read it, if there are too many different types they might get confused and just won’t bother even start.
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| An example for a really badly designed poster |
You can try new things out but this is another example of someone who didn’t do his/her research before creating this flyer. You have to know your typography before creating a text. The first thing to look at when making the decision is the content. What is the text about? Is it a children’s book, and interview with a shopkeeper or a flyer for a beauty therapist? Also the text has to work with the photos and illustrations that go with it. The colour is another important part, it’s the easiest to read when the white typeface is on black background or the black typeface is on white background. You have to be careful with yellow and other vivid colours.
This text is using many different types but you can see that this time the designer knew a lot more about typography and could put the different types together beautifully.
“Less is better.” This saying is not always true but it’s true most of the times.
Visual Hierarchy
It goes hand in hand with legibility. In a text you have to highlight whatever part is more important than the rest, if everything is the same size, same colour and type the reader’s eye can get tired especially when reading a longer text. The title has to come out, so to start with the reader knows what is the content going to be. Depending on the importance, to highlight the different parts in the text you can change the colours, the sizes and you can change where to put them; up in the corner, in the middle, etc. Obviously bigger typefaces catch the attention more likely than smaller ones. People might get confused when there is a lot of information on one page but if it’s designed well they find it easy to get through. If there isn’t a visual hierarchy they won’t know where to start reading or what to look at first, their eyes might jump from one corner to another without actually finishing reading anything on the page, poster, menu, illustration, etc.
Probably the most important place in the design industry to do your job well. Road signs. They have to use big and easily readable types so even if you are moving fast you can read them without concentrating on them too much. Every colour has it’s meaning so even without reading the text or looking at the illustration on the sign the driver will know from a bigger distance what it can be about. Red is usually warning you about something; white-on-brown direction signs are for tourist attractions, etc.
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