Document Journal

1. ENGL 392A Information Design Document Journal Jordan Noakes

2. Document 1 Pound Magazine’s “The Sleepies”

3. Document 1 Pound Magazine’s “The Sleepies” Pound Magazine’s recent aesthetic overhaul successfully incorporates design techniques that help solidify the publication’s position as Canada’s (and perhaps North America’s) leading print authority on “high” street culture. For an audience that prides themselves of wearing overpriced sneakers and t-shirts from ultra-chic “boutiques,” Pound attempts to distinguish itself from the typical street culture magazines like Vice by improving the quality of paper, the effectiveness of binding, and adding a price tag. It is very important for designers to use techniques that cater to young, city-dwelling adults who consider themselves a new sort of avant-garde, with appreciation for off-the-wall aesthetics that increase feelings of solidarity through use of the “cool factor.” Even after considering the consolations that must be made by designers, however, it is safe to say that the design of Pound Magazine’s “Sleepy Awards” fails in several ways. The two-page spread of 8.5” by 11” porous paper serves to recognize cultural elements which have been most “slept-on” or under appreciated and acts as a central piece of the March 2007 “Slept-On Issue.” Redundant repetition of “Most Slept-On” leaves little doubt as to the articles purpose. Though the article contains no vital information, designers ignored some very fundamental design principles that would have gone a long way in establishing an effective, usable design. One of the major flaws is the failure to observe principles of good continuation. By placing the information chunks in a zigzag pattern on the more information rich page, designers ignored typical continuation cues that suggest alignment and smooth curves are most helpful in directing the reader. Designers also failed to link the image on the left side of the spread to the information provided on the opposing page, with the unfinished border posing the biggest obstacle for interpreting the spread as a unified design. While subtle internal aesthetic consistency of colour and typeface helps to unite the two elements, they seem unrelated upon first glance. An interesting element that can be considered as either sugar or noise depending is the graffiti graphic included in the bottom left corner. Though the Gutenberg Diagram would indicate that the placement of the graphic in the weak fallow area disrupts traditional reading gravity, the inclusion is an important choice that not only adds aesthetic appeal for the intended audience, but

4. Document 1 Pound Magazine’s “The Sleepies” also speaks volumes about the magazine’s informal style that playfully acknowledges their stance as a primary authority within high street culture. All of this is not to say the design was completely void of effective design techniques: a good figure-ground relationship is established on both sides of the spread, chunking the theoretical winners into smaller categories aids memorization (if that is anyone’s goal), the design displays some uncharacteristic symmetry, there is redundant repetition of the most important information, and the design included two appropriate and highly legible typefaces. Still, these successes are not enough to overcome the failure to observe traditional design principles that would have aided cohesion and readability. Though the design may be more effective when view from the core, new avant-garde audience in urban centers, its hard to see how Pound’s “Sleepies” spread would be an effective information package for anyone, “cool” or not.

5. Document 2 Passport Application

6. Document 2 Passport Application

7. Document 2 Passport Application Post 9/11 security lockdowns have caused a series of institutional panics, and it is now apparent that Canadian Passport Offices are feeling the wrath of the most recent episode. Canada wide, thousands of passport applications are being processed weekly in order to meet with the new, more stringent regulations on international air transit. Unfortunately for Foreign Affairs Canada, the designers have failed to design a document that is easy to navigate for its intended audience of Canadian applicants 16 years of age or older. Several failures to observe traditional design principles add up to create a confusing document for any audience, but especially those with poor vision. The paper document is available for print online and at Canada Post locations, but is intended to be examined carefully and completed over time. The version at the Canada Post locations comes folded in an envelope intended for mailing upon completion, with the durable, mat 11”x17” sheet folded into a two-page booklet. The cover and document as a whole is designed in a surprisingly uncharacteristic colour scheme for a Canadian government document: Though the different saturations (or perhaps brightnesses) of yellow and blue are used in accordance with traditional complementary ideals, I find it surprising that designers failed to firmly establish the document as Canadian by straying from a predominantly red colour scheme. Still, the front page remains the part of the document with the fewest design flaws, only the poor contrast of inverse text on yellow background and the inefficient chunk of white space posing any threat to readability. The cover page does an adequate job of providing preliminary information that becomes more redundant when it is repeated in the individual sections. The inside spread contains fewer instructions and is intended to be filled out by the applicant. Unfortunately, the designers’ failure to observe fundamental principles leads to significant confusion for any applicant. The typeface is a highly readable monoline sans serif, but is small and unnecessarily crammed in certain areas, especially the warning near the top of the left page. The areas intended for the applicants address are not well labeled as to the correct spot for each piece of data, and the series of arrows seems unnecessarily and inefficient, particularly the arrow that includes the vertically oriented “COMPLETE NEXT PAGE” text.Similarly, designers make another poor use of inverse highlighting by placing white typeface on a sky-blue background, making for

8. Document 2 Passport Application illegible text providing instructions for perhaps the documents most important information (seeing as failure to abide to the instructions turns the application into scrap.) The “Additional Personal Information” section on the back of the application is another area where designers make poor use of space. In concession, they do leave the option of adding an additional sheet, but to even include the tiny table seems like a waste of space that, judging by the cramming if information elsewhere, could have been put to use for more practical purposes. Perhaps I’m bitter because I’ve made errors filling out two copies of this form already: Being in the middle of my second consecutive semester in design courses, I can only imagine the struggle faced by other applicants. The fact that the application for such a valuable document is so poorly designed makes me wonder who Foreign Affairs officials are hiring with tax dollars, and leave little doubt as to why many Canadians are raising a fuss about long waiting periods.

9. Document 3 Campbell’s Soup Label

10. Document 3 Campbell’s Soup Label For marketing teams world wide, the quest to form all-important brand loyalty cannot be completed without first ensuring brand recognition. Luckily for designers at the Campbell Soup Company, few product design alterations have been needed to retain the company’s position as the world’s number one seller of canned soup. By successfully employing several fundamental design principles, the Campbell’s can label is a highly recognizable image that now makes its way into kitchens in 120 countries worldwide, with global sales of close to 3 billions cans annually. The designers have likely designed the can with adult females as a primary target: this demographic still tends to do most of the grocery shopping and cooking. As opposed to the darker, more forceful design of the Campbell’s Chunky soup line, which blatantly markets to men looking for a hearty soup alternative, the traditional look is meant to highlight the product’s reliability and simplicity. The goal of the can is to grab attention both on the store shelf and in a kitchen cupboard. The elements on the outside of the can is intended to give the reader suitable information to both describe the contents of the can and how they are prepared. Whether in the store or in the kitchen, the can is designed to be selected for use in the face of many competitors. Since an 1898 can redesign that was responsible for Campbell’s first profitable year, the red-top white-bottom can has become design legend. The white script display typeface is highly effective on the dark-red background and the subtle black shadowing works surprisingly well given the lack for contrast with the ground colour. The gold, block-capital text under the logoface is highly illegible, but is only intended as supplementary information for the buyer. The addition of the blue elements is a recent design alteration that is intended to segregate the different types of the original Campbell’s product: chicken, beef, and cream soups, for instance, are grouped for users’ sake. The white inverse sans serif text on the blue ground is effective and highly readable. An early 1990’s redesign added a graphic of the soup and limited the size of the soup name in order to keep up with the increasingly graphic based cans of competitors. The typeface of the soup name, however, has remained constant. The label has even retained the gold medallion (although as a less prominent feature) which has been featured on the product since their soup received an award for excellence back in 1900. Though the text for the preparation directions and ingredient listing is small, the high contrast of the

11. Document 3 Campbell’s Soup Label monoline sans serif face makes it highly legible. There is redundant repetition of the Campbell’s website, and other supplementary information such as telephone numbers for Kids Help Phone and the Parent Help Line is included to help foster the company’s image as a nurturing, community based organization. Valuable standardized nutritional facts are highly readable and pose little distraction to the user. Clearly, the designers at Campbell’s have abided by fundamental design principles in their minimal alterations of the product label, along the way solidifying their place as the world’s number one canned soup and establishing the can as the important cultural embalm immortalized by Pop Culture artist Andy Warhol in the 1970’s.

12. Document 4 Gun Shop Flyer

13. Document 4 Gun Shop Flyer Sometimes a documents cultural context restricts outsiders’ ability to relate to its information design. For instance, this pamphlet found in a rack at a Nevada Burger King location that promotes a discount firearms retailer attempts to fulfill a purpose that is completely unfamiliar to a Canadian-bred vacationer. Though the shouting headline was effective in capturing my attention, with a military style font offering restaurant patrons a chance to “Shoot a Machine Gun,” there is no question that the marketing team at Discount Firearms Inc. had their ears ringing during design class. The side that was facing the potential customer features a center alignment with the exception of the left justified headline. The machine gun and target graphics are placed at the top of the 9 x 4 inch matted cardstock and gives the reader a clear indication of what is contained in the document. The top half of the front side is the most information efficient, using highly legible typefaces and effective bolding, plus establishing external consistency by using Winchester Ammunition’s traditional typeface. The important information is almost unavoidable. The bottom half of the front side is very noisy and poor spacing adds a reading barrier. The lack of contrast between the blood-red type (possibly chosen for the colour’s general association with violence) and the black box makes for a poor inverse, and by cramming the address into the limited remaining area, designers forced poor spacing and extensive abbreviations. Though the three-colour printing likely saved designers money, they have compromised the legibility of their company name. The large map in the bottom half seems like it would do an adequate job of guiding anyone with some familiarity of the area, but the labeling of streets and landmarks is confusing, inconsistent, and ineffective. The store hours and website have also been crammed into the bottom right, running perpendicular to the rest of the information. Though I thought this may have been an intention strategy intended to prepare the reader for landscape orientation of the verso side, the more common vertical flip would produce an upside-down information design. Once the reader has reoriented themselves for the verso side of the pamphlet, they are introduced to several other design failures. The company name in the lower right corner is inconsistent with the version on the front (one has a comma, the other none) and the shadowing adds unnecessary noise while doing little to highlight.The heavily pixilated image seems very unnecessary and takes up valuable space that obviously could have been

14. Document 4 Gun Shop Flyer used to reduce clutter. The format of the directions is poor, with far too many characters in each of the two lines, especially for a sub-10 point typeface. Though this side of the pamphlet does make good use of redundant repetition of the phone number and again effectively employs bolding to draw attention to the most important information, the inconsistent spacing and bordered textboxes distort reading gravity. The distorted profile of the text around the Heckler & Koch and Glock logos is another failure to observe standard design principals and contributes to the overall impression that professionals were completely absent from Discount Firearms Inc.’s design process.

15. Document 5 Hypebeast.com

16. Document 5 Hypebeast.com The prominence of the internet as a source of instant information has created important new considerations for information designers.  A web adaptation is available for most every document, and it has become increasingly rare to see an information dense document without a URL that points the reader to a complementary website.  The fact that the internet is routed as a free, highly accessible public domain has meant that websites are often designed by amateurs who ignore fundamental design principles.  Still, the pages with the most efficient designs remain online staples within a genre, as is the case with Hypebeast.com, the internets most trusted site for the latest news on the happenings of street fashion and culture. While Hypebeast's general content is similar to that of Pound Magazine (discussed in journal entry 1), the Hypebeast designers avoided some of the pretentiousness associated with Pound's look by opening the door to an audience not familiar with typical street culture aesthetics.  Though the website provides numerous daily updates and has thousands of archived briefs, the layout suggests the page is primarily intended for scanning as a "catch up" for connoisseurs who can't make hourly trips to sneaker and fitted hat boutiques.  Arranging the entries in reverse chronological order ensures that repeat visitors are faced with the newest information first and can avoid any further searching for the material that is hot off the presses.  The left alignment and consistent spacing are great aids for linear processing and encourage the visitor to navigate down the page and eventually to the link for the previous entries.  Interested viewers can access extra content for a particular release (if it is available) by simply clicking of the "Continue Reading" link provided at the end of the summarized entry, and weblinks for the release's primary source are included for supplementary information. An unfortunate yet unavoidable constraint of any web document is that individual users have their choice of settings, which can have a drastic effect on the appearance of a webpage. If, for example, a user was to visit Hypebeast.com with a 800 by 600 pixel screen resolution display setting they would have to scroll horizontally to see the full width of the page, while a 1152 by 864 pixel resolution causes a bar of unused white space on the right side of the web browser. The designers clearly intended for the page to be viewed at 1024 by 768 pixel resolution, generally Windows default setting, and effectively employed the Rule of Thirds,

17. Document 5 Hypebeast.com with the article briefs taking up the righttwo-thirds and navigation and sponsor information relegated to the remaining third. While the monoline sans serif font is highly legible and fits with the standards for linear web scanning, a Roman face may have been a better choice due to the subjective, personal point-of-view adopted for the individual entries. Overall, they Hypebeast.com designers have shown their proficiency by using inoffensive colours, employing informational “sugar” by way of graphics for every entry, and subtly yet effectively making use of spacing and dividing techniques that completely avoids a hierarchal information structure. Menus and unfortunate-but-necessary advertising are clear and successful, but pose little threat to the vertical reading gravity and add little distraction to the user. It really is the ideal web source for street culture enthusiasts to keep up to date on the scene.

18. Document 6 Real Estate Junk Mail

19. Document 6 Real Estate Junk Mail There is certainly a reason that loose-leaf flyers are often termed junk mail, and every daily delivery seems to contain yet another information design tragedy. Amongst today’s culprits was a tri-fold 8½ x 11 inch yellow paper advertisement for a local real estate agent. While the flyer undoubtedly fulfills its purpose of notifying the recipient of a house that was “JUST LISTED!” on the market, a series of violations of fundamental design principles has produced a disastrously unprofessional aesthetic that would be hard for any adult to take seriously. Nadica Sloan immediately attempts to limit her audience and encourage a feeling of solidarity by opening the document with “Neighbourhood News!” I received the document; however, in a residential area primarily occupied by students that is several blocks away from the advertised John Street location. Under this delivered context and as many of the design choices indicate, the audience would be anyone who is currently searching for a house. The low-resolution graphic and extreme textual emphasis is included to promote investigation by any recipient who may already be in the market for real estate, but one has to question the practicality of passing out flyers of a $189,000 home in what is essentially a student ghetto. While the use of a warm, Roman typeface is clear, familiar, and reproduces the feeling of solidarity, the treatment violations are overwhelming. The highlighted text is emphasized to the point that it has compromised readability by detracting from prototypical reading gravity. A definite consideration should have been made to include another typeface as a form of emphasis, making it easier to reduce the highly noisy underlining. The bulleted list is well aligned, but the use of initial capitals and exclamation points gives the individual items an awkward profile. Along with the extra underlined space before “JUST LISTED!” and the use of the term “Extra Special Features,” this unprofessional treatment add to the feel that the document could very well have been designed in MS Paint by a ten year-old. Further, the listed information about schools violates typical alignment cues and looks almost like its missing its checkmark as part of the list. This information that I would think is highly valuable to anyone looking to purchase a family home is cluttered and perhaps even completely unfamiliar (I know it was to me.) An opportunity to add a sense of the professionalism to the document is missed when Ms. Sloan fails to include the familiar air balloon logo of her company Re/max.

20. Document 6 Real Estate Junk Mail The only time the typeface is altered is for the company name, which is almost lost in the rest of the furious treatments. The picture in the page’s terminal area is another good way for the seller to increase a feeling of solidarity with the potential buyer, but the placement so close to the edge of the page seems unnecessary in an otherwise symmetrical layout. Though I am in no position to be purchasing real estate and am therefore outside of the intended audience, I cannot see how the design of this realty flyer would possibly appeal to anyone. The fact that such an amateur design is intended for a demographic that likely has a more professional and formal aesthetic sensibility than myself makes the design decisions even more mind-boggling.