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Disc Design Critique
Shawn Colvin
A Few Small Repairs
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| One of the least legible discs I've ever seen, somehow it still managed to sell millions of copies and win a couple Grammies. Oh well, perhaps graphic design isn't the only thing that sells records, after all.
The designer spec'd the type to knock out to silver. At the top, where the type is reversed out through only one color, it works...sort of. Silver scans very dark, so these scanned images are somewhat misleading; when you hold this disc in your hand and look at it, the silver and the yellow are almost the same greyscale value. This lack of contrast between type and background makes the copy very difficult to pick out. Still, the text at the top works better than at the bottom, where the type knocked out through two inks to silver presents an extreme challenge to the eyeballs.
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reversed through
1 color (top)
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reversed through 2 colors (bottom)
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| In order for the silver type to look clean, the two inks have to be lined up perfectly - something that no manufacturer can pull off every time (including Sony, who made this disc). This designer sin is known in the printing world as the dreaded "1:1 fit" [one to one fit]. You can't trap it. You can't do anything about it except point it out to the designer and say "It isn't going to look the way you think it's going to look. How about overprinting black instead?" When the designer tells you no, you cringe and send off the film to the manufacturing plant, well aware of the swearing that's going to ensue when the package is opened. "*!#% me. Hey boss, check this out. What do you think this type is, 4 point?" "Don't worry about it. Do what you can. They get what they get." ... despite the supervisor's reassurance, the press-op still does his level best at the impossible task of lining up two colors with precision beyond the tolerance of the machinery involved. He cares about his work, after all, although on days like today he wishes he didn't...
Insufficient contrast between type and background. One to one fit. Miniscule fontsize. And to top it all off, the artistic device of wrapping the type around the disc in concentric circles, so that you have to rotate it to read it. Millions of people own this disc; have any of them bothered to fight their way through the design to read the copy?
Cripes. What were all the idiots who bought this album thinking? :-) |
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