Mispronounciations
THAT’S A MISTAKE, of course. Most people know that the noun isn’t pronounciation, but pronunciation. And they’ll duly write in to Radio 4 in their hundreds every time they hear the word on the radio. The surprising thing is that they’ll write in to complain even when it has been pronounced correctly: they’re expecting it […]
The perfect Eurostar font
IT’S NOT OFTEN that a corporate entity such as Eurostar gets playful with typography. But this notice on their London St Pancras platform is a splendid choice of font. The font, called Mr Eaves, was designed in the 1990s (in Birmingham, as it happens) but perfectly captures the essence of 1940s French beer bottle labels […]
“You can quote me”
YOU’LL HAVE SEEN QUOTATION MARKS around the most unlikely of phrases. Their proper use is to indicate that a saying has been first pronounced by someone else: “Neither a borrower nor a lender be,” as Polonius said. It all dates back to Aristotle, who called this technique one of the five non-technical proofs of rhetoric (the technical […]
Perfect headline fitting
NEWSPAPER SUBEDITORS go to great lengths to make headlines fit the page. This isn’t a recent innovation – it’s been happening since the beginning of commercial printing. This poster board from the Evening News of 1911 features four decks of headline, all exactly the same width. OK, it’s not perfect from a typographic point of […]
The red big bus
THERE’S NOTHING GRAMMATICALLY WRONG with that headline. Determiner, adjective, adjective, noun. So why is it so awkward to read? Every native English speaker instinctively knows the correct order in which to place adjectives in a sentence. Let’s give it its correct formulation, and make it longer: The big old red London bus. Moving any of those […]
Pissing policeman
THE WINDOW OF A POLICE STATION in Geneva, Switzerland. Is it just me, or does that graphic of a policeman pasted on the window look like he’s been taken short?
Electrical, & Co
MUCH AS I’D LIKE to admire the logo for electrical contractor Mitchell & Co – after all, it’s not often an independent electrician goes to the trouble of creating his own logo – I can’t help feeling that this is trying just that bit too hard. It’s a cute idea, and it very nearly works. […]
Passing off
IT’S TECHNICALLY ILLEGAL to try to copy a commercial rival’s design in such a way that it will tend to confuse the buying public, leading them to associate your brand with theirs and enticing them into making the wrong purchase. It’s known as passing off, and it’s not only frowned upon, it’s against the law. […]
Meetings and action
EVERYONE LOVES A GOOD MEETING. It gives them the opportunity to nibble a few custard creams, to drink more coffee than is good for them and to play the odd surreptitious game of Angry Birds while checking their social feeds. Meetings take place during the working day, and so everyone who attends a meeting is […]
Speak softly
WHEN WORKPLACE DISCUSSIONS turn into arguments, tempers begin to fray and the atmosphere can quickly heat up. Pretty soon, someone’s going to start shouting. Don’t attempt to shout back. That will only result in them shouting louder, and the winner will be the one who shouts the loudest. Instead, lower your voice so you’re speaking deliberately […]
Watch the background
THERE ARE MANY DIFFERENCES between professional and amateur photographers. One of the key failings of happy snappers is an inability to look at what’s going on in the background. You’ll often see holiday shots with a telegraph pole growing out of someone’s head, or a plane driving into their ear, or half a printed sign drawing the […]
Saying no
EVERY PARENT HAS EXPERIENCED the problem of being ground down by persistent nagging. The very worst phrase you can use to your children is “Oh, all right then.” It may have taken them ten minutes to get you to cave in. Next time it may take twenty. Or half an hour. They don’t care. If nagging […]
Telefonica innovates
TELEFONICA, LIKE MOST mobile phone providers, isn’t known for its innovation in design. But look at the way these two simple words have been set, each letter casting a shadow on the one that follows. It’s enticing, it’s novel, and it draws you in, in a way that plain text wouldn’t. I’ve never seen this […]
Kindle formatting
WHEN YOU BUY A PRINTED BOOK, you can reasonably expect it to be professionally laid out, with due care and attention to avoid unsightly widows and orphans. With digital publishing, it seems those considerations go out of the window. How much effort would it have taken to avoid this stupid cockup?
In-car messaging
HERE’S A HELPFUL MESSAGE from the car I rented recently. I have absolutely no idea what to do with this information, or lack of it. Is this similar to describing something as “indescribable”?
Chicken or egg?
WHICH CAME FIRST, the chicken or the egg? It’s an old problem. The chicken had to come from an egg; but the egg had to come from a chicken. Or did it? Chickens evolved, just as people evolved. So there must have been a first chicken, before which there was a Jurassic chickenosaurus, or whatever. But there […]
Giant spiders
WHY CAN’T PEOPLE BE TWICE THE SIZE? Why don’t we see giant spiders, like we do in the movies, in real life? It’s staple of science fiction movies, after all. So is it possible? In a word, no. There’s a good reason why spiders have thin spindly legs, while elephants have great thick chunky ones. […]
Conspicuous lack of aliens
IF THERE IS INTELLIGENT LIFE out there, why haven’t we been visited by aliens yet? It’s a question that every child, and most adults, will ask at some point or other. Think of it this way. According to the Guinness Book of Records, the fastest earth-made rocket travelled at just under 50,000 miles an hour. How […]
I don’t know much about art…
BUT I KNOW WHAT I LIKE. You’ll have heard this time-worn phrase repeated time and again. But do you really know what you like? How can you tell? Some works of art are visually appealing, some are challenging, some are downright ugly. But you might find a basket of kittens too cheesy, and an ugly […]
See what you like
VISITING ART GALLERIES can be a rewarding experience. It can also be exhausting, as you trudge around room after room taking everything in until you’re overwhelmed by visual stimulation. My approach is to glance around each room, and then only look at the paintings or sculptures that catch my eye. Rather than spending 20 seconds […]
Lying to kids
WE SHOULDN’T LIE TO OUR CHILDREN. Obviously. It goes without saying. And yet we do lie to them, with the full approval of society. Father Christmas. The Easter Bunny. The Tooth Fairy*. In fact lying to children – or, at least, teasing them with false propositions – helps them to grow intellectually, and to realise […]
Winning at Hangman
HANGMAN IS A GREAT GAME, and can be played anywhere. All you need is a piece of paper and a pen. But the winning strategy is counterintuitive. Most players will give you a long word to guess, on the assumption that choosing long words means you have many more letters to find and so will lose […]
And another thing…
GOT A COMPLAINT? Good. Then make it. After all, no-one wants to be treated like a doormat. The ability to complain is a fundamental human right. But if you do complain, either by phone or by email or in person, then just complain about one thing. Keep your complaint short and to the point. That […]
He who hesitates
HE WHO HESITATES IS LOST, we’re told. (The quotation is actually a misquote from Joseph Addison’s 1712 play Cato, in which he says “The woman that deliberates is lost.”) It doesn’t mean that you should leap precipitously into a new situation, but that hesitation produces unforeseen complications. Suppose you’re driving your car and are pulling out into […]
Don’t misquote me
YOU’LL OFTEN HEAR PEOPLE talking about Shooting themselves in the foot, or Gilding the lily, or proclaiming that Money is the root of all evil. These quotes are either wrong, or used incorrectly. Shooting oneself in the foot The phrase is most often used to suggest that someone has inadvertently committed a blunder. But that’s not at all what […]
Poetry and prose
LIKE EVERY OTHER SCHOOLBOY and girl in the country, I was taught that poetry should be pronounced ploddingly, with a pause at the end of each line, making sure you hammer home the metre: Di dum di dum di dum di daaaah, Di dum di dum di doo; Di dum di dum di dum di daaaah, […]
How to get to sleep
IT’S A COMMON PROBLEM: you lie awake at night trying to get to sleep, trying to free your mind, but the harder you try, the more elusive sleep becomes. Here’s a method that works for me. Close your eyes. OK, now open them again so you can read the rest of this paragraph, but then […]
Polite notice
WE’RE ALL USED TO SEEING so-called ‘polite notices’ – which aren’t polite at all, of course; the word is there simply so that, at a glance, we misread the as ‘police notice’. Attempts at real polite notices tend to backfire, such as the Thank you for not smoking that used to appear in the back of taxis […]
Damned lies and statistics
WHAT’S THE MOST DANGEROUS SPORT? By which I mean, which sport has the most fatalities during play? It’s not motor racing, or hang gliding, or extreme ironing, or potholing, or even mountaineering. Or any of the sports you might traditionally think of as dangerous. It’s bowls. Why? Because bowls is played by old people, and they’re more […]
Happy Birthday
IF THERE’S ONE TUNE every pianist needs to be able to play, it’s Happy Birthday. The problem is, everyone sings in a different key, so where should you start? In my experience the best key is F, which suits most singers. The first chord, interestingly, is not F but C7, which means you can start with […]
We need zombies
EVERY GENERATION needs its baddies. In the 1940s and 50s, it was Red Indians. In the 60s, it was Nazis. In the 70s and 80s, it was aliens. And in the 21st century, it’s zombies. Why do we need them? Because every generation needs an enemy that can be slaughtered in huge numbers with impunity, without […]
Be arsed
YOU’RE SITTING THERE on a Saturday evening with nothing to do. A friend phones and asks if you’d like to go to for a drink. You think… oh, I really can’t be arsed. Be arsed. Be bothered. Because so many people can’t be bothered, and being bothered is worth it.
Things that go up at the end
THINGS THAT GO UP AT THE END have more power and dynamism. It’s a rule that applies to music, film editing, graphics, and company names. If a film editor is cutting a piece of film of someone on a swing, for instance, they’ll almost always cut away when the swinger is at the top of the swing, […]
Heads you lose
I USED TO ENJOY games like Tetris, where you battle against the computer to try to improve your score. But I became increasingly frustrated, as however good you get, you can only end up losing. Every game of Tetris continues until you fail. The same goes for a huge range of traditional arcade games – […]
If only
WORD PLACEMENT WITHIN A SENTENCE does, of course, affect the sense of the sentence. But there are few words whose precise location changes the meaning of the sentence as much as the word “only”. Consider the following variants: Only John poured sugar in his coffee today. No one else poured sugar in their coffee. John […]
Admire the Vue?
VUE CINEMAS ARE GREAT. Big, comfortable seats, great projection, plenty of leg room. But their booking system – until recently – was pig ugly. Book using their app and you have to put your card in the machine to pick up your tickets, and this is the screen you get. Whoever designed the interface for […]
Font frenzy
THIS IS HOW I imagine it went… – So I’ve found this really funky font for ‘Festival’. It’s called Handel Gothic, which sounds really trad, but it’s really super cool. And I’ve got this awesome Illustrator brush, let’s build a big swirl that goes round the F and through all the letters. – That’s mega! […]
Web leaks
A POSTER IN THE WINDOW of an estate agent. There’s nothing wrong with repurposing a design from one medium to another, but perhaps before printing this A4 sheet they could have reconsidered “Click here to sign our online petition”.
Updating classics
IT’S HARD TO KNOW where to stand on the tricky issue of updating classics to suit contemporary sensibilities. One argument is to leave them alone. But can the BBC really broadcast The Dambusters in full, complete with Wing Commander Guy Gibson repeatedly bellowing for his dog with the unfortunate name? When my children were very […]
Straighten your spine
THE DESIGN OF BOOK SPINES is a largely overlooked art, as most of the effort – naturally enough – goes into the cover. But when your book is on the shelf, either at home or in the bookshop, the spine is all people will see; you have to ensure it’s visible and appealing, and that […]
Newspaper design
HANDS UP WHO KNOWS what a newspaper looks like. All of you? That’s great. Perhaps you could tell the graphic designers who work on films and TV shows, since most of them have clearly never seen one. There have been many obvious gaffes – like the fact that the same prop newspaper has been seen in […]
Stories with pictures
EVERY PICTURE TELLS A STORY. And, whether you’re giving good or bad news, every story must have a picture. The design of the BBC News app takes the form of a grid of images, which means that each feature has to be supported by an introductory photograph. But if you’re a hard-pressed sub editor on […]
Tequilicious!
A BEAUTIFUL NOTICEBOARD in Wahaca Mexican restaurant. It’s full of great detail – note the target in Don’t Shoot, the cancel sign in Lemon, the drips in 100%, the bottle in Tequila – yet the approach is defiantly typographic. Remember, the designer started with nothing but a list of phrases. To have the imagination to turn a dull set of […]
Black or white?
YOU MIGHT THINK that headlines are more legible in black. But when placed on an image, you’d be wrong. Even when placed on a light background, such as the sky and clouds seen here, the black headline looks muddy and hard to read.White headlines are almost always far more legible on top of photographs, even when the […]
Information overload 2
I SPOTTED THIS SIGN in a car park in Great Yarmouth. Well, yes, it certainly comprehensively covers the range of available payment options. But I can’t help thinking this information could have been got across in a rather more economical way.
Information overload 1
WHEN IS INFORMATION too much information? When the viewer is so overwhelmed by input that it’s impossible to take anything in. There may well be some vital message on this hospital notice board – after all, it does deal with the tricky issue of infection control – but you’d be hard pressed to find it […]
Design without pictures
CREATING AN EFFECTIVE LAYOUT is made very much easier when you have plenty of photographs, charts or other graphics to help you liven up the design. But a lack of imagery doesn’t mean you have to create a dull layout. The designer’s toolbox includes a range of techniques that can make a layout look appealing […]
Cycle of fifths
THERE’S A TRICK USED BY MUSICIANS when they get lost: it’s called the cycle of fifths. It’s a kind of satnav device that allows you to get back home from just about anywhere. You can jump to any chord, for dramatic effect, and get back to where you started using a simple but effective technique. The […]
Baked bean lies
“A MILLION HOUSEWIVES CAN’T BE WRONG.” So ran a TV commercial for Heinz Baked Beans in the 1970s. But a million housewives can be wrong. Every last one of them. Just because a lot of people all do the same thing doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to do.
Yes, and no
ALL OUR MATHEMATICS, and consequently all our science, is based on the logical concept that philosophers call the Law of the Excluded Middle. This states that every proposition is either true or not true, but not both. It sounds obviously the case, but it doesn’t always apply to the real world. There are degrees of truth. […]
Playing by ear
I STARTED PLAYING THE PIANO IN PUBS at the age of 16. People would ask for a well-known song, and I couldn’t admit I didn’t know it – so I spent a few weeks trying to play songs I knew well enough to whistle, and learning how to fit the chords to them. Of course, people rarely want […]
Measure twice
MEASURE TWICE, CUT ONCE is such an old carpenter’s motto that it now sounds trivial, but it’s the most sound piece of DIY advice I’ve ever been given. Far too often I’ve measured up, cut a piece of wood to the right length, and then found it doesn’t fit. Measure it, go to cut the […]
Finger counting
HOW HIGH CAN YOU COUNT on your fingers? 10? Pah. I can count up to 1,023. Here’s how it’s done. It’s useful if you want to count the number of people who turned up to your birthday party, or count the number of times a politician says “family” in a speech. Imagine each of your fingers […]
8 billion names
I CALCULATED RECENTLY that 267 (in other words, 26 multiplied by itself seven times) is 8,031,810,176. Which means that, as there are 26 letters in the alphabet, there would be enough combinations for everyone on the planet to be identified by a unique seven-letter word. With a few spares, so you could weed out the rude […]
Music notation
THOSE UNFAMILIAR WITH WRITTEN MUSIC tend to regard scores as an impenetrable mass of dots and lines. But it’s really quite straightforward: it’s just a graph of time (on the horizontal axis) against pitch (on the vertical axis). Here’s how the beginning of the main tune from Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus would look if written out as […]
Six chord trick
WHILE YOU CAN PLAY MOST SONGS with just three chords, you get a lot more flavour if you add the relative minors of each of these chords. These are chords three notes below each of the main three. The relative minor of C is Am (the notes are A, C and E); the relative minor of […]
Three chord trick
EVEN IF YOU’RE NOT MUSICAL you’ll have heard people pouring scorn on bands like Status Quo, who appear to know only three chords. But why those three chords? What’s special about them? Let’s say you’re playing in the key of C. The scale of C can be played entirely on the white notes of a piano. […]
That’ll do nicely
ONE OF THE MOST MEMORABLE television commercial series of the 1970s was for American Express, created by Ogilvy & Mather. In the first commercial, first aired in 1975, a businessman rushes up to an airline check-in desk with the words “I’ve got to get back to Bahrain tonight”. He produces his American Express card, which is […]
Advertising slogans
IN MORE GENTLE TIMES, slogans always included the name of the product. Guinness is good for you. Ah, Bisto! All because the lady loves Milk Tray. Happiness is a cigar called Hamlet. Don’t be vague, ask for Haig. This approach is now seen as somewhat heavy-handed, and a subtler approach is considered more appropriate. We’ve […]
Spear carrying
THERE ARE MANY WALK-ON PARTS in Shakespeare’s plays, especially those produced with a budget large enough to pay for the actors. Watching a production of Julius Caesar, I was distracted by a spear-carrier in the background. He had no lines, and his only duty was to hold the spear and look like a guard. But he […]
The ballet problem
SOME YEARS AGO I was taken to a production of Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet at the Royal Albert Hall. The performers managed a laudable interpretation of the fight scene in which Romeo slays Tybalt, and the balcony scene was delivered with an appropriate amount of passion. But when it came to Juliet visiting an apothecary to […]
On the horizon
ONE OF THE FUNDAMENTAL MISTAKES many people make when creating a scene is incorrectly placing people at a variety of sizes. Sure, people further away appear smaller, but how do you make them all seem to be in the same scene? This is the sort of situation you frequently see: It’s a clumsy arrangement, and all […]
The right multi-tool
SWISS ARMY PENKNIVES are very cute and make great birthday presents for 13-year-olds, but they’re much too clumsy to use as serious tools. Far better are multi-tools of the Leatherman/Gerber style, which incorporate a strong pair of pliers (the most useful tool of all). All multitools come with screwdrivers and knives, and most have a woodsaw […]
Go cordless
THERE HAVE BEEN MANY OCCASIONS in the past when I’ve wanted to do a simple job, such as drilling a hole, sawing a piece of wood, or using a glue gun to join two objects. I have plenty of power tools, but the hassle of finding an extension lead, plugging it in, trying to avoid getting […]
Tools: start cheap
WHENEVER I NEED a new tool of a kind that I haven’t tried before – a table saw, a pair of pliers, a hack saw – I always start with the cheapest one available. After a few days’ use you can figure out what to look for when buying a better model. When buying a table saw, it turns out […]
Instruct, don’t humiliate
NO CHILD LIKES TO BE TOLD what to do, especially in public. If your child has a habit of eating with their mouth open in restaurants, then drawing attention to it – especially if it means doing so in front of grandparents and other children – will simply make them feel bad. Instead, try a subtle gesture, such as pinching […]
Distraction beats anger
ONE OF THE MOST FRUSTRATING behaviours for an adult to cope with is a child’s tantrum, especially in a public place. They’re embarrassing for the adult, and the recourse is often to get more and more stern until you end up with a yelling, furious adult and a screaming child. Tantrums may be a bad experience […]
Stick to the point
WHEN TRYING TO PERSUADE an adult to do something they have an aversion to, we try to come up with as many reasons as we can why they should follow our instructions. It doesn’t work that way with children. Here’s a typical series of instructions: Eat your dinner, before it goes cold. Eat it now, it’s […]
Why is spam illiterate?
I GET A LOT OF SPAM. You probably get a lot of spam. Email in-boxes around the world are overflowing with spam. But is it all as slapdash and rushed as it seems at first glance? Here’s an email I was sent, reproduced exactly as I received it: From: Henrietta Frazier To: Steve Caplin Payment […]
Why buy a Mac?
IN THE LATE 1980s, in the early days of what was then known as desktop publishing, you needed an Apple computer if you wanted to run the software that would enable you to take part in the communications revolution. It became the norm for company computers to be split along partisan lines: Apple Macs for […]
The iPhone problem
THE iPHONE IS PROBABLY one of the world’s most popular technological achievements. It revolutionised the mobile phone industry when it was introduced in 2007, and I strongly recommend you take the time to watch the inspirational and charismatic Steve Jobs making its introduction. The iPhone is a fantastic music player, movie player, camera, web browser, […]
Walking in, walking out
SHOW SOMEONE WALKING from one side to the other in a photograph and you have the potential to tell a story. But the story you tell depends on their position in the scene. Place the person on the far left (assuming they’re walking from left to right) and we can see how far they’ve got to […]
Left, right and centre
AMATEUR PHOTOGRAPHERS will almost always frame their pictures so that the subject is dead centre. is is almost always a bad location, as it’s very static and inactive. Better to place people to one side, which not only makes a scene more dynamic, it also offers a better view of the background. If you photograph […]
Printer’s jargon
WHETHER IT’S A SIMPLE FLYER or a multi-page magazine, at some point you’re going to have to deal with a printer. Every word of jargon you use will knock a bit more off the quote, and that’s because they’ll be more confident that the file you give them will actually be printable to your specification. […]
How much is a million?
WE USE NUMBERS like million and billion every day, without really thinking about what they mean. Apple sold 70 million iPhones in the last quarter. There are 13 million people living in Tokyo. But a million is such a vast, unwieldy number that few of us have a real grasp of what it means. So […]
How music works
ALL MUSICAL NOTES ARE PRODUCED by vibrating air. That vibration can be caused by a plucked string (in the case of a piano or a harp), or by wind bouncing off the inside of a tube (a clarinet or a trumpet), or by a stick hitting a resonant object (a drum or a xylophone). The […]
Serif or sans?
SERIFS ARE THE SHORT STROKES on the ends of letters that guide the eye along the line. They originated with Roman stonemasons, who carved them at the top and bottom of letters before carving the letters themeselves, to prevent the deeper strokes from splitting the stone. “Sans serif” letters are simply those bereft of serifs, […]
Caution: design ahead
IT TOOK ME A WHILE TO FIGURE OUT why the designer of this sign in a Shrewsbury hotel chose to set the A in ‘caution’ in upper case, at a larger size, and in a different colour. Look closely: there’s a tiny red exclamation mark inside the A. Get it? It’s intended to resemble one of […]
Web leaks 2
IF YOU’RE DESIGNING A QUICK SIGN, then it makes sense to grab an arrow off the internet rather than going through the laborious process of selecting the Arrow tool in Word. But this isn’t an arrow. It’s a web button. Are we supposed to press it for more information?
Patient disservices
THESE TWO NOTICES appear on adjacent walls in University College Hospital. Both say the same thing. Note how the amateur version goes to great lengths to try to make the text stand out: it’s set in capitals plus bold plus underline, all in an attempt to create extra emphasis. But if it’s the only text on the […]
Flushing in style
CAN A LAVATORY FLUSH ever be beautiful? Yes, when it’s as elegantly understated as this one. No words are needed: the large and small buttons express their purpose without text, and so without any coy euphemisms. Compare the simplicity and sophistication of that flush with this awkward mishmash on Brittany Ferries. The button should be obvious […]
Upper or lower case?
THE TYPOGRAPHIC TERMS “upper case” and “lower case” refer to the wooden boxes in which typesetters stored the individual letters. Today, these terms are used describe capital and small letters. Beginners will frequently use upper case lettering for posters because they think it stands out more. This is rarely the case: UPPER CASE TEXT IS USUALLY HARDER TO […]
Brown’s Bldg’s
MAYBE IT WAS THE SIGN WRITER’s day off, and his work experience assistant did the job. Or maybe he’d had a heavy lunch and was suffering from indigestion. But can there really be any excuse for the misplaced apostrophe? And why didn’t they just make the sign bigger, since the space available is easily wide enough?