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Update: Minimalist villains!

Listen to this, from the Forbes blog:

During a panel discussion at the Digital Hollywood New York conference, Gerald Marzorati, the Times’s assistant managing editor for new media and strategic initiatives, explained why the paper’s print business is still robust. “We have north of 800,000 subscribers paying north of $700 a year for home delivery,” Marzorati said. “Of course, they don’t seem to know that.”

As evidence that Times subscribers don’t realize how much a subscription costs, he pointed to what happened when the paper raised its home-delivery price by 5 percent during the recession: Only 0.01 percent of subscribers canceled. “I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that they’re literally not understanding what they’re paying,” he said. “That’s the beauty of the credit card.”

…Stealthily hiking rates on the assumption that customers are too dim to catch on and/or too lazy to do anything about it is the kind of thing that gives banks, credit card companies and cell phone providers such a bad reputation. When I pointed this out after the panel to Marzorati, he was quick to dial back his condescension. All he meant to say, he explained, is that customer retention is always better in an opt-out situation.

Nick has been pointing out the problems with this kind of scammy thinking for a while now, but it’s a bit of a surprise to hear it from the New York Times. More evidence that you’ve got to keep a leash on your social marketers — and that includes anyone who speaks for you in public.

I was so impressed with this video that I decided to break form and share it with you.

Check out more videos by Pogo here.

Via.

Via, Core77 via Mocoloco.

According to the BBC, researchers at Princeton University recently found that when people read information that’s presented in harder-to-read fonts, they can recall it better than information presented in clearer fonts. The researchers argue that schools could boost results by simply changing the font used in their basic teaching materials. This also has interesting implications for designers.

The following is excerpted, roughly, from the BBC article:

28 volunteers in a Princeton study were given 90 seconds to try to memorize a list of seven features for three different species of alien. The idea was to re-create the kind of learning in a biology class. Aliens were chosen to be sure that none of the volunteers’ prior knowledge interfered with the results.

One group was given the lists in 16-point Arial pure black font. The other had the same information presented in either 12-point Comic Sans MS 75% greyscale font or 12-point Bodoni MT 75% greyscale.

The volunteers were distracted for 15 minutes, and then tested on how much they could remember. Researchers found that, on average, those given the harder-to-read fonts recalled 14% more. They believe that presenting information in a way that is hard to digest means a person has to concentrate more, and this leads to “deeper processing” and then “better retrieval” afterward.

Interesting information here for web and print designers, and an opportunity to reflect on some traditional design wisdom. The traditional strategy is to design all of the information you’re presenting in a way that is as clear and easy to read as possible. This makes sense, I think, because most often designers are tasked with delivering information to an audience that is assumed to be at worst hostile and at best indifferent to the message.

But this policy may be self-defeating in non-advertising contexts. If this research is on to something, there may be circumstances where it makes sense to intentionally design things (think about, for example, instruction booklets, magazine articles, and so on) with fonts that obscure clarity. In cases where we’re sure that the audience wants the information, we might be doing them a service by printing it in a less than perfectly clear font.

Food for thought.

More here.

For Paul Rand’s posthumous induction into The One Club Hall of Fame, Imaginary Forces created this short film, combining original animation with a videotaped interview of Rand himself, that encapsulated his unique and timeless contribution to the design community.

Via