Tag Archive for: alison

Can You Read Me Now: Choosing Fonts for Cataract Patients

All over the country, doctors and their teams work hard to restore vision for their patients. The ophthalmologist’s toolbox is outfitted with trusted, life-changing procedures and techniques like advanced cataract surgery with lenses that help patients rely less on their glasses. Eye care professionals help change their patients’ perspective by making the world brighter and clearer.

At MJM, we help provide clinics with educational tools, brochures, ads and websites that cater to people with cataracts. One of the tools in the designer’s toolbox is typography. From signage and directions to brochure and website fonts, legible type can set the tone for a patient’s experience.

Here are a few things we keep in mind when we make typography decisions for audiences with limited vision:

1. Choose high-contrast colors

Cataracts prevent some light from reaching parts of the eye that create an image. When text color is too similar to background color, letters and words may become muddled and difficult to distinguish. Black or very dark text on a white background is most legible.

Graphic about choosing fonts for cataract patients - choose high contrast colors

2. Choose full-bodied letters

Fonts with a tall x-height, wide letters and long descenders and ascenders are easier to discern because they take up more space and create shapes that are easily recognizable.

Graphic about choosing fonts for cataract patients - choose full-bodied letters

3. Used mixed-case type

ALL CAPS not only appears to shout, but it also can make text harder to read. So can italics. Our brains read words as shapes rather than identifying individual letters. And since we are more used to reading in sentence case, our minds can process those words more quickly.

Graphic about choosing fonts for cataract patients - use mixed-case type

4. Choose moderate stroke contrast

Find a happy medium between uniform thickness (like Futura and other trendy sans serif fonts) and super high contrast. To someone with blurred vision, an ultra-thin stem can virtually disappear from the page.

Graphic about choosing fonts for cataract patients - choose moderate stroke contrast

5. Avoid condensed fonts

They narrow the natural shape of letter forms to take up less space. But, this also means that they are more difficult to read.

Graphic about choosing fonts for cataract patients - avoid condensed fonts

6. Use serifs for paragraphs

Serifs are like little signposts telling our eyes where a letter begins and ends. In a paragraph, they direct our eye traffic as we dig into longer copy.

Graphic about choosing fonts for cataract patients - use serifs for paragraphs

7. Stay positive

Negative text (white on a dark background) gives the illusion that the letters are thinner than they actually are, making them more difficult to read.

Graphic about choosing fonts for cataract patients - stay positive

8. Size matters

Twelve-point font looks different for Futura than it does for Brandon Grotesque. Printing an example proof can help tell if the font is going to be large enough.

Graphic about choosing fonts for cataract patients - size matters

9. Embrace space

Without enough space between lines, letters and around the text block, legibility is compromised. There are a few ways to do this:

  • Increase leading (space between lines) to about 1.5 times the normal amount.
  • Increase tracking (space between letters) so letters are less likely to visually run into one another.
  • Increase the margins to appropriately frame the text.
  • Write concise copy. Adding content to a limited space can compromise legibility. Shorter copy can be compelling, especially when it gets read.

Graphic about choosing fonts for cataract patients - embrace space

Like most rules in design, there are always exceptions. A font with uniform line thickness and low x-height like Brandon Grotesque compensates by increasing the leading (space between lines) without manual adjustment. The font that populates a brochure may not be the best for an outdoor parking lot sign.

Reference: http://www.aiga.org/typography-and-the-aging-eye

The Art of Making Cookies

What got you into cookie decorating?

My mom and I have collaborated on cookie projects for years.

Frosted sugar cookies are a classic Christmas tradition in my family (like many others!). From the beginning, I embraced it: rolling out dough, selecting shapes, working elbows deep in flour, covering each cookie with a little lake of frosting, and placing sprinkles precisely where I wanted them. And even when they looked bad, they tasted like buttery-sweet heaven. What’s not to love?

Once, someone gave my mom a Halloween cookie with frosting that had been piped with a piping bag and tip rather than spread clumsily with a knife. It was a detailed design with three different colors and we were impressed. My mom and I thought, “We could do that.” We had the supplies, the recipe and were only a few YouTube videos away from sinking into cookie world.

Our first big project was part of a fundraiser for a family friend with breast cancer. We made dozens of ribbon cookies with pink royal icing. Some had tiny, hand-piped messages of thanks. People were delighted by them and I think it’s that kind of response that motivated us to keep going. We have created cookies for themed parties, baby and bridal showers, graduations, birthday parties, and of course, holidays.

Decorated cookie

What is the favorite cookie you’ve ever decorated?

One. You want me to pick just one cookie?

This is cheesy, I know. I got married last July and my mom and I made cookies for all of our reception guests. We didn’t count the sticks of butter or the hours it took to finish it all, but there were many. After a day and a half of piping flourishes onto cookies, I made one for Casey. While it’s not as clever as the margarita glasses with sugar rim cookies or elegant as an all-white wedding dress cookie, it was a privilege to give him something homemade with love. Plus, he’s my biggest fan and offers to taste-test for me. Win-win.

Decorated cookie

How is decorating cookies like graphic design?

  • Both are creative processes. Every step involves small decisions that contribute to a complete end product. There’s also a lot of ongoing incremental refinement to the process. In cookie world, we’ve edited the sugar cookie recipe so it holds its shape during baking and still tastes good. I’ve tried most types of cookie cutters available and have learned that metal work the best.
  • Principals of design matter. What makes something beautiful and functional? Contrast, color, balance, rhythm, etc.
  • The process is messy! The kitchen, my desktop, even my Illustrator pasteboard can be a mess in the middle of a project.
  • In every batch there’s a sad failure. Broken cookies, poor quality photos, a botched idea. Mistakes happen and it’s part of learning and getting to a great final product. (Note: Cookie mistakes are tastier than design ones.)
  • Beauty and function work together. A brochure about cataracts can look great and incorporate interesting images and illustrations, but the true test is when it’s in the hands of a patient, learning about cataract surgery. Cookies are the same. I’ve been told “It’s too pretty to eat!” which is beyond flattering, but the cookie’s real purpose is to be eaten. And to be delicious.
  • It’s about people. I love being able to bring something beautiful into someone’s day or help them do so for others.

Decorated cookies
How is it different?

  • Ctrl+Z (the shortcut for delete) is so helpful in design work. It does not, however, translate to spilling an entire bottle of sprinkles. Physical mistakes cannot be undone.
  • Iteration is much faster in digital design. With a few clicks, I can try out options before making a decision. Cookies take much, much longer.
  • Cookies have a clear purpose: look good, taste great. As a graphic designer, someone poses a problem and I have to design the solution. For example, the problem might be that potential LASIK patients are dissuaded by the cost of surgery. The solution might look like a brochure, a digital campaign about HSAs or a video testimony from a patient who thinks LASIK was totally worth it. I have not yet pursued cookie decoration with the intent to educate, but perhaps I’ll give it a shot.
  • Cookies are perishable; design may last long after the project is complete. The lasting power of a logo or video that hits the mark might make the difference for a client. Because of that, the work we do has to be good.

A Hand Lettered Alphabet GIF

GIF of a hand lettered alphabet

I drew one letter every day for 26 days last December. The alphabet. Alpha through Zed. The ABCs. I completed the hand-lettered alphabet project just for me. I made a gif of it just for you.

Some letters took a few tries before I came to something I liked. “F” was a fantastic failure if I remember correctly. “X” is all over the place.

None of them would function well in a font. Still, every time I put pen, pencil, or marker to paper, I faced decisions about line, movement, dominance, value, and balance. These design element decisions are important to practice. Letter forms are the perfect tool for rapid iteration, once you get to know them.

Characters are purely symbolic. They have no meaning until people come along and give them something. Still, anyone using the Latin alphabet recognizes that an A is an A; it has a sound, a name, and looks like an angle with a crossbar.

Because an “A” already has a form structure, I have the freedom to add flourish and dimension. “B” forms of the world add curved elements to the challenge. “C”s abandon straight lines altogether. Their personalities are curious and demand attention. When I do it again, they will be different, but never perfect.

Stories Give Us Access to the Senses

If I asked you to tell me about your day would you give me the number of breaths you took? Would you inform me that the number of steps you took was 23% higher than yesterday? Would you tell me about how many ounces of coffee you drank or the minutes you waited to get your coffee served? You might. But you’re more likely to tell me about the old friend you met at a cafe and how you spent the noon hour on a walk to catch up.

Numbers can show great leaps of progress or small measures of change. They can articulate a problem and stun. They can represent chilling or inspiring statistics. But are they powerful enough to evoke action? Are they human enough?

Founder of charity: water, Scott Harrison, presented on the scarcity of clean water for people in developing countries at the 2014 OTA conference. He outlined the problems these people faced and the solutions charity: water was providing using numbers and stories. Guess which would stick?

  • He gave the audience a fact: 800 million people are living without access to clean water in the world today.
  • He told the audience a story: A teenage girl living in a remote village spent most of her days walking to a natural well, waiting in line to collect water and walking back with a heavy pot full of water. One day her pot fell from her hands, breaking on the dry ground. From the pieces of broken ceramic, she pulled the rope that held it to her body. She used it to end her life.

What is more memorable? (I’ll give you a hint: I had to look up the number.)

  • Another fact: charity: water has been able to supply more than three million people get access to clean water
  • Another story: charity: water helped build a well in a community where mothers and daughters were responsible for collecting water. After it had been installed, one woman told the organization that not only did she have extra time in her day and enough water to care for her family, she could care for herself. She felt beautiful.

The statistics might wow, but numbers so large are unimaginable. The problems that each person faces are simplified when they become a lump of 800 million. The people are simplified. When we invite narrative to the discussion, however, we have a mnemonic device for something so enormous and unreachable.

Stories give us access to the senses and can lodge these things into our memories. It’s no wonder that we teach children about numbers in units of cheerios, tricycles and pumpkins — things they can touch, smell and taste — instead of an abstract symbol.

Numbers give us important reference points, too. We can say 800 million people are without access to clean drinking water, and we can give it a scope by saying that’s 1 in 9 people on the planet. Nine is a number I can comprehend and 1 in 9 is a perspective I can count on my fingers — a perspective that just might give me a story to tell.

Risky Business: A Social Media Warning Label

In a virtual world where social media puts customers on the same plane as CEOs, branding can get pretty interactive — which is helpful when there’s a whole community of supporters behind your cause and your brand. The approach can work one of two ways:

  1. Start a following and count on customer feedback to organically spread your brand or,
  2. Regulate feedback into positive (but predictable) channels.

Here’s how it looks:

A ridiculous request

One hotel hit the virtual jackpot when a story shared by one of its customers went viral. When a guest booked a room using an online form, he jokingly requested that the hotel staff place three red M&Ms on the counter and a photo of bacon on the bed. The hotel fulfilled his ridiculous request, much to his amusement and surprise. The photos he posted of their customer service went viral, giving the hotel national coverage.

Customer voices matter more with a social media megaphone

The gamble? Social networks have just as much volatile potential as they do a positive one (remember the national outcry when Twinkies went away?). Recently, a national coffee chain saw an outcry from customers about its rewards program policies. When certain members started seeing emails about losing points, they took to Twitter with 140-character complaints. Surrounded by immediate responses, these customers expected open communication from their favorite brand. When they began to distrust their store, unhappy customers sent up virtual warning flares for all of their followers to see.

Unhappy customers sent up virtual warning flares for all of their followers to see.

Instead of trying to let their winnings ride, some organizations have intentionally shaped their social connectivity to enhance positive feedback channels from users. Individual companies or collaborative apps give users the option to favorite or share what they see and like—and then make a purchase almost instantly. Shoppers happily spend their time and money without thinking about the virtual apparatus they use. As a result, shopping becomes social as shoppers interact and browse each others’ virtual closets.

A small worthwhile risk

Happy customers and bigger followers happen when high customer service standards work with a virtual experience that focuses on positive feedback. It’s a gamble worth testing out.