Bad typography has ruined more than just the Oscars

Source: Bad typography has ruined more than just the Oscars, Vox, 5:59, uploaded 2017-03-21, playlist index 1589.

At the 2017 Oscars, Warren Beatty looks at the announcement card for Best Picture and hesitates. The card says La La Land, although the winner is Moonlight. Beatty senses that the information in front of him does not fit the category, yet the card gives him no quick way to confirm what has gone wrong. Vox uses that pause to ask what a different typographic hierarchy might have changed.

The announcement card as a cue card

The Oscar card has two jobs. It becomes a keepsake for the winning film and a cue card for a presenter who has to read under intense pressure. The design shown in the video gives “Oscars” the first position, even though the people on stage already know which ceremony they are attending. The category and winner then arrive after this extra piece of information, which costs a few milliseconds when the presenter has to scan the card in front of roughly 30 million live viewers.

Benjamin Bannister, a graphic designer, makes an alternative card that treats the category as the first fact to find. The source compares the task to reading road signs whilst driving: a person has a few seconds to find the information that determines the next action. In Bannister’s version, “Best Actress” would immediately signal the category, and the winner’s name would become the largest element on the page. The film still appears as useful context, while the category and winner carry the weight needed for a public announcement.

That hierarchy creates two chances to catch the mistake. A presenter could read “Best Actress” before saying the winner, or see “Emma Stone” and recognise that the card belongs to another award. Vox applies the same idea to the card that led Steve Harvey to announce the wrong winner at Miss Universe in 2015. The claim stays conditional. Better typography could have exposed the error sooner, although the source does not establish that it would have prevented either incident on its own.

One visual path through the ballot

The same problem appears in a more consequential setting. In the autumn of 2000, the supervisor of elections in Palm Beach County, Florida, had to fit more candidates onto a ballot than one column could hold. The result became known as the butterfly ballot because the names occupied two columns with a line of punch holes between them.

The visual order breaks at the point where a voter has to act. George W. Bush appears first, so the first candidate uses the first punch hole. Al Gore appears second, yet his name points to the third hole. The layout supplies two visual paths, and the voter has to work out which relationship between names and holes the form intends.

The Palm Beach Post estimated that more than 2,800 Gore voters accidentally selected Pat Buchanan. Voters filed lawsuits asking for a new election, saying that the design had led them to choose the wrong candidate or punch twice. Bush won Florida by 537 votes. Vox therefore says that better typography could have changed United States history, while keeping “arguably” attached to the claim. The ballot design offers a plausible source of confusion. It cannot prove how every disputed vote would have been cast in a different form.

Graphic designer Michael Bierut makes an alternative ballot that keeps the same information in roughly the same space and arranges it horizontally. The redesign gives the names and punch holes one visual route to follow. It removes a relationship that voters have to infer at the moment of voting. The point lies in the structure of the page, since the typeface alone does not solve a ballot whose visual order conflicts with its instruction.

Medicine labels and user priorities

Vox then moves from exceptional public events to the orange prescription bottle found in many American homes. The bottle has existed since just after the Second World War, apart from the child-safety cap added in the 1970s, and its basic information hierarchy has changed little.

Pharmacy branding often takes the first and largest position on the label, although the user’s immediate need lies in the medicine name, dose, timing, and warnings. The remaining information is set small and at a similar size and weight. Confusing numbers receive the same emphasis as useful instructions. Warnings may appear in difficult colour combinations such as black on dark red, and the curved bottle forces the reader to rotate it to follow the text.

Deborah Adler designed ClearRx after her grandmother took her grandfather’s medicine by accident. The source attributes an estimate of 500,000 cases of people misreading prescription-bottle instructions each year in the United States to unnamed experts. That figure remains a reported claim from the video rather than verified evidence here.

Adler moves the branding down and makes the information needed by the patient large at the top. Colour-coded rings distinguish the user as well as the medication. The bottle’s larger back surface leaves room for warnings that can stand apart from the rest of the label. Target bought the design and introduced it in 2005 to positive reception. About ten years later, after Target sold its pharmacy business to CVS, the bottle disappeared. Some users reportedly searched their bins for old bottles, while CVS said it was developing a similar model that had not yet appeared when Vox published the video.

The work that disappears when it works

These examples describe typography as a way to reduce the amount of interpretation a person has to perform. The Oscar presenter needs the category and winner in a clear order. The voter needs one relation between a candidate and a punch hole. The patient needs the medicine and its instructions to take precedence over the pharmacy’s identity.

The source’s final point is also its quietest one. People tend to notice a design after it causes an error or after a familiar design disappears. A good label or form leaves the user with nothing to discuss because the intended action remains easy to find. Different typography might have changed the Oscars, the Florida vote, or medicine misuse, although Vox presents each case as a question of plausible influence rather than a settled causal result.

Further reading / references

• The Palm Beach Post, whose estimate of more than 2,800 Gore voters selecting Pat Buchanan appears in the video.
• Benjamin Bannister, the alternate Oscars announcement card shown in the video.
• Michael Bierut, the alternate Palm Beach County ballot shown in the video.
• Deborah Adler, ClearRx, the prescription-bottle design shown in the video.