Neither of the designs are good-looking (but that may be the point). The left design though is objectively inferior:
* The text in the right column is centered, rather than aligned, and is thus ragged on both sides, making it harder to read and sloppy-looking.
* The leading on "beginner class" yeesh.
* The body copy in the left column is set at the same size as the header text in the right column.
* The right column has indistinct headers with inadequate contrast.
* The right column mixes header signifiers, in some cases using all uppercase, in others bold.
* The body copy in the left column uses an oblique sans and the right column uses a similar sans, minimizing contract (notice how the "after" design uses a true italic)
* The "sections" in the right column are set off with pointless thin rules, which is a design annoyance so basic that Tufte yells about it early in (iirc) The Visual Display Of Quantitative Information.
* The right column has no hierarchy, so the contact information is set in exactly the same prominence as the rest of the information, so clumsily that the URL runs into the margin.
I guess I could go on.
This is pretty basic "Non-Designers Design" Robin Williams stuff. I don't see how you can criticize this blog post by suggesting that the "before" design is better. It's not. It's artificially bad: someone took a reasonable design and a list of everything you can do wrong in a page design and built a demo.
I agree with another comment on this thread though about the clip-art; it muddled the point the article was trying to make. They should have worked the same clip art into the "before" picture if they wanted to do that.
> Neither of the designs are good-looking (but that may be the point).
I do hope that was by choice, because, if so, this illustrates beautifully how "attractive design" and "good design" are not the same thing (bonus points to be had if the author had managed to make the left poster prettier than the right one).
> I agree with another comment on this thread though about the clip-art; it muddled the point the article was trying to make. They should have worked the same clip art into the "before" picture if they wanted to do that.
To me,the clip art said one thing, loud and clear: "After redoing the design, I'm left with a truckload of empty space". Considering how crowded the design on the left looks like, it's easy to think that you need _more_ room to fit everything in nicely, rather than less.
Everything you listed are good points using theoretical, book knowledge, but isn't the only "objective" way to evaluate the two posters to put them in front of a sample of the target audience and measure their reaction? What you're doing is applying general guidelines as if you can determine the overall quality of a design by running the design through a checklist.
For example, you dock the left for having indistinct headers with inadequate contrast. But that's actually a good thing, since the headers are useless in both posters! But only in the right example are they distracting because they followed the "good design checklist".
The headers in the "after" picture aren't useless. They communicate:
* Aikido
* Beginner
* Regular schedule
* Come visit
That seems like a very sane set of goals for a poster about an aikido class.
In the "before" version, the copy about the "mind, body, spirit" connection of Aikido is set in a larger font than the text saying people should come visit!
Who, what, where, & when are mandatory items on a checklist for this type of communication. But if the way you point to them draws attention to your finger and away from the vital information itself, you've failed. That's why the headings are useless. You allude to this yourself in your final sentence.
The spacing on the right is so much worse than everything else combined. The text is much too close to the borders, the heading are much too close to the text, the weight balance is all off, it's completely all over the place.
The text in the right hand picture is almost but not quite on a baseline grid. It's not perfect, but it's consistent. The text is consistently further from the page margins than in the "before" version. All the text on the right hand column lines up on a single line.
I don't know what "weight balance" means in this case, but there are more type styles in the "before" than the "after".
I agree, but you've missed the most important point (IMHO).
The "adult class" stuff should go in the "beginner class" box, no? Assuming they're the same class (I honestly don't know).
// I guess you could also take the "beginner class" headline out of the box and only highlight the important data. (Then it would read "AIKIDO Beginner Class" at the top, which may or may not be useful. And the black box and the picture would be aligned.)
// Also if you switch the clip art and the address block you could fold the thing in the middle. (Basics on the front, details on the back, or something.)
It's easy to see how the "after" is better if you assume the goals of the poster are to communicate:
1. Aikido
2. Beginners
3. Regular schedule
4. Call to action: come visit
The obvious response is to suggest those might not be the best goals for the poster. That's fine, but when you look at the "before" poster again, you see that it can't really have any real goals, because it has (by design, on purpose) no hierarchy whatsoever.
Right flyer has a way better info hierarchy. Highlights are more readable from a distance : Aikido(subject) , beginner classes, regular classes, come visit(call to action). I don't know Aikido (I'm a Taido guy) so I don't know what the symbol on the bottom represents.
Also, the contact information on the left is not uniform (i.e. not similar) which creates unnecessary contrast and being emphasized (via size, all uppercase, boldness) it attracts unwanted attention (You don't want the contact information to grab the eye of your reader, because it takes some of his time and he might lose interest before even figuring out what your flyer is about, someone who has read your flyer and is interested in finding out more will seek out the contact information).
Design is mainly about directing your reader's eyes throughout the flyer and attempting to retain his/her interest in the few seconds that you have his/her attention.
When you have to use design principles to argue against the fact that many people think the "poorly designed" poster looks better, your principles have failed you, and maybe it's time to reconsider them.
There is no reasonable way to argue that the "before" poster is better designed. Centered text, contact information typeset as loudly as the rest of the content, mixing uppercase and boldface for section headers, a URL bleeding into the margins.
Neither design is good, but the "before" design communicates nothing clearly, while the "after" at least rewards a glance with the knowledge that:
* there is a regular class schedule
* you can come visit without an appointment
That information is also in the "before" design, but you have to read carefully to find it.
The most important thing to understand design is that a good design has clear goals. The critiques I'm reading of the "after" design seem to be based on the idea that all the information in the poster is equally relevant; they ignore the goals of the poster --- by necessity, since the "before" poster objectively doesn't have a goal, which it deliberately demonstrates by not having any hierarchy.
If you don't care about the goals of the poster, you can just go with whether you like or dislike the thin black rules dividing it up, or whether you like big text or little text. But you're missing the point if you do that.
> There is no reasonable way to argue that the "before" poster is better designed.
Yes there is. More people think the left design is better, ergo it is reasonable to assume it is a better design.
The failure of the right design, and why people don't like it, even though the one on the left is a visual cacophony, is that it doesn't bring out the information people are interested in. It uses design principles to box them into an information hierarchy so you can find them, but that's an extra step it's introducing. You don't have to find the key information point in the left one because they're presented up front. A quick linear skim and you've gotten everything you need. You'll notice that all of the important information a person needs to know is visually distinct from the rest of the poster and larger on the left.
Here's what I need to know: what is this about? (Akido), when are classes I (a beginner) can take, how can I get in contact with this place?
The left answers this with a quick scan, the fact that the leading on the words "Beginner Class" is worse on the left is irrelevant, the information, which is all I want, is more prominent. It doesn't matter that there's a section called "Come Visit" on the right, I know what an address, phone number and URL look like on sight (automatically and instantly) and my context know that they'll be about the Akido school, and the left poster does a better job and making those elements larger, easier to read and more visually distinct.
In fact, I can recognize what a phone number looks like before I can even register what all the numbers that compose that phone number are. I can even find the number on the left poster in my peripheral vision somewhere around where my eye hits "Regular Classes" on the left. I have to both find the "Come Visit" section and get about halfway through it on the right poster before I can even register that there's a phone number on the poster at all!
To use an analogy, the left poster is a bright direction sign on a dark street. Immediately noticeable, visually distinct, clear call to action "come here to Akido!". The right poster is a library, well organized, guaranteed to contain key elements, but you need to navigate the organizational scheme to get what you want out of it.
The right design doesn't present information, it organizes it, and that's a failure for an advertisement poster.
He lost me in the first paragraph, because my first thought was that the one on the left looked a lot nicer.
Both have the same information, but the one on the right makes much of the text smaller and less bold, harder to read. The left column on the left flyer also looks a lot more pleasing to the eye.
Yeah, I think none of the 2 look really good, but the left one looks cleaner.
Like what is that weird circle thing doing on the right one? Putting clipart-style stuff on a flyer just because you need to fill some space doesn't feel like good design to me.
Typography on the right one is a lot better tough.
"In Zen Buddhism, an ensō (円相 , "circle"?) is a circle that is hand-drawn in one or two uninhibited brushstrokes to express a moment when the mind is free to let the body create."
"The ensō symbolizes absolute enlightenment, strength, elegance, the universe, and mu (the void). It is characterised by a minimalism born of Japanese aesthetics."
I can't speak to why it's there; possibly ties in to aikido?
Yes the Zen circle thingy ties in to Aikido. Aikido is a (some say useless) martial art which emphasizes using an attacker's motion against him, and philosophically contains many philosophies which it shares with Zen Buddhism.
Exactly how I felt. I think this is because I focused on the left part of both pages instead of the right. The left side of the left flyer is much easier to read because the right flyer's text is too small and kind of ugly.
I found the right side of the left flyer less clean because of the lack of distance between the borders and text, but I wouldn't have even bothered to look there had I not read that the right was supposed to look cleaner.
I preferred the left one too, but I was looking at them side by side on a 11.5" notebook computer display, and the flyers were presumably designed for printing onto 8.5x11 paper.
Another possibility is that we may be looking at two bad designs.
I came to the comments for this. I immediately liked the left way better, and then saw "If you said right one, then I did my job." I stopped reading after that because he obviously didn't do his job.
Every piece of important information is larger and clearer on the left. Obviously there are flaws, but I think it could have been redesigned in a much more effective way.
