Design Pet Peeve #6: The Incubation Principal: In small as well as large arenas of life, there is lag time between the beginning of an action or cause and an inevitable reaction or effect: in other words, an incubation period. Have you ever placed a glass of water with ice in it on a table, and rotated the glass slowly around? Did you notice how long it takes for the ice to start rotating as long as it doesn’t touch the glass? Or, for that matter, how long it takes the ice to stop after you have stopped rotating the glass? Molecules of water have to move by friction from the glass inward until they reach the ice: that’s a form of incubation common in the physical world. On a cosmic scale, the coldest days of winter always come after the shortest day, as do the hottest days of summer follow the longest. The same principal applies in immunology. Several communicable diseases, such as measles and chicken pox, are at their most contagious just prior to their symptoms manifesting themselves externally. Some say this is what is happening to the Earth right now; that we have passed a tipping point with our profligate misuse and cavalier “disposal” of the Earth’s resources, incubating our own destruction for centuries, and from now on, no matter what we do, our climate, air, water, and soil will continue to degrade until eventually the Earth will correct the situation by curing the disease: humans. This sounds defeatist and dire for our species, and may indeed be true, but what does design have to do with all this, you ask? Ideally, everything.
Design Pet Peeve #5: Let’s address the specific design principal of Consistency: The use of elements the same throughout a system no matter where or how they are employed; and how the lack thereof can cause stress, frustration, and sometimes dangerous situations. Since I spend a great deal of my design time on signs, I will use them as my examples. Traveling by car to a new destination without the aid of an accurate GPS unit can be highly stressful. If your destination is a major attraction such as a specific spot within an airport, the signs should lead you right to it, like Hansel and Gretel breadcrumbs strewn on a forest path. But just as in the fairy tail, sometimes those breadcrumbs mysteriously disappear mid-journey. And sometimes, the design, color scheme, size, placement, symbology, or text content change from sign to sign or location to location, making the journey all that much more frustrating.
Design Pet Peeve #4: Unreadable text. Can’t find that shop? Can’t read what’s on that jar? How many signs or labels around the world do you know that are unreadable or confusing for one reason or another? I know a lot.
Design and place human-scale objects taking into account the largest number of potential users with the widest range of physical abilities; in other words, to design universally. Design Considerations. Questions to ask while developing designs for any two- or three-dimensional purpose. Not all necessarily apply to all designs. The most important consideration from the beginning of the design process is the ultimate outcome of the design, the end-user, and their interaction with one-another.
The Design Process. A generic guide that can be adapted for use through any design development.
Design Pet Peeve #2: Sales Receipts. In the USA there is a standard chart-style label mandated by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for inclusion on most food packages. Similar charts are required or recommended in many other countries including Australia, New Zealand, India, Mexico, Canada, and the European Union. In the USA, it’s a small black and white list titled “Nutrition Facts. Are you familiar with it? The label was controversial at the time the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) required it in 1994, but has since gone on to be considered one of the finest single design breakthroughs in the history of graphic design. Why? Because each label has more-or-less the same look, layout, size, shape, content, and placement no matter what product it explains.
Design Pet Peeve #7: Lack of Correlation. Correlation means agreement among parts, interrelationship, or connection. In design, the short meaning is that once an element of any kind is introduced into a system or project, the look, size, and placement of that element should remain the same throughout its use. It can be color-coding, type styles, shapes, sizes, placement, or the like. But, a breakdown of standardized usage in a design can produce a confusing or downright dangerous situation. I’ll give one example of poor correlation: E-mail and document-forwarding sites allow you to include attachments with the prompt button marked “attach” or “attachment.” But on some sites, when you get to the point where you have an attachment ready to include, the prompt button says “enclose,” or worse, “open,” instead of “attach.” This may seem like a minor point, but if you were to expand the dilemma created by this type of poor correlation to something larger, like a web site or the logic of a building’s layout, the results would be confusion and frustration. If extrapolated to the scale of an airport communications system, the results could border on catastrophic