Design Feast Series: Quotes

“A while ago I was lucky enough to go and see Erik Spiekermann give a lecture. Part of his talk was about his redesign of The Economist magazine. He mentioned that one of the primary reasons for the redesign was that The Economist thought their design was too heavy. The content was difficult to read. In newspaper design, which has so many parallels with web design, information is dense. Sometimes, as in web design, it’s difficult to add white space because the content makes it hard to do so. Newspapers often deal with this by using a typeface for the body, which is quite light and has plenty of white space within, and around, the characters. This was part of Erik’s solution for the redesign of The Economist. He redesigned the typeface slightly, whilst retaining the quirkiness of the original. He added more whitespace to the individual characters. He set the type slightly smaller I believe, with more leading. All of this was adding micro white space to the design. The overall result was subtle. The content was more legible and the overall feeling of the magazine was lighter, yet there was still the same amount of content.

I learnt from Erik that day that, in order to achieve a lightness and an increase in legibility in a design, and this especially applies to the web, you don’t have to look at the design at a macro level. Looking at the space between the tiny stuff, at the micro level, can have a big impact on the effectiveness of a design.”

Mark Boulton, Web Designer