As anyone in the office will attest to, I am a stickler when it comes to typography. Poor typography can single handedly ruin a design, and is a tell-tell sign whether or not a designer is worth their weight. Ever since the advent of “web design” bringing good typography to the web has been a struggle for designers. There’s a constant battle between aesthetics and accessibility, and most of the time accessibility wins out. For good reason. With the introduction of CSS (cascading style sheets) our ability to manipulate and set type on the web has been greatly improved. However designers are still greatly restricted when selecting fonts for the web.
Perhaps one of the most surefire ways to simultaneously elicit emotions of rage and despair in your designer is to remark “I’ll know it when I see it.” To a designer, that roughly translates into, “I have no idea what I want, but I’ll expect you to produce revision after revision until we run out of time and money settling on something neither of us are that happy with.” Simply put, “I’ll know it when I see it” kills dialogue and puts the designer / client relationship on a fast track to Revision Hell, complete with micro-management and an endless sea of comps. Read more »