You can blame a lot of people for the awkward Best Picture mix-up at the 2017 Oscars. But what about the typography on the announcement card itself?
Bad typography has ruined more than just the Oscars
How graphic design can shape award shows, elections, and your medicine cabinet.
Christophe Haubursin was a senior producer for the Vox video team. Since joining the team in 2016, he has produced for Vox’s YouTube channel and Emmy-nominated shows Glad You Asked and Explained.
It’s hard to know for sure, but there’s a good chance that if the announcers were given a card with a better text layout, they wouldn’t have called up the wrong winner on accident. Graphic designer benjamin bannister laid out exactly what a better card design could have looked like, where information is prioritized based on its importance:
Readability matters. The same kind of treatment on Steve Harvey’s Miss Universe announcement card could have saved him from misreading the winner back in 2015. It’s easy to think that small layout changes don’t matter much for these huge, complex productions to run smoothly — but whether presenters can read what they need to read can make or break a show.
The importance of legible, reader-friendly products also has implications beyond entertainment. In the 2000 presidential election, punch-card voting ballots in Palm Beach County, Florida, were designed so poorly that they made it incredibly easy to vote for the wrong person. The Palm Beach Post estimated that 2,800 voters who intended to vote for Al Gore had accidentally punched in a vote for Pat Buchanan — a far larger number than the 537-vote margin with which George W. Bush won the county.
But even when better graphic design options exist, it isn’t inevitable that companies will choose to use them. In 2005, Target rolled out a new look for its prescription bottles — and they were a hit. The bottles, made by designer Deborah Adler, prioritized the information that was most important to the user, and emphasized readability and ease of use. Adler minimized additional record-keeping information that served no obvious use to the user. But after Target sold its pharmacy business to CVS in 2015, the bottle design disappeared.
Watch the video above to learn more about how bad typography can influence a lot more than you might think.
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