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I was just designing something with a collaborator, and we came upon this debate: is it really “better” to make a flier harder to read in order to improve retention?

You’ve probably seen Princeton’s recent study, which suggests that easy-to-read fonts actually make the content more difficult to remember than harder-to-read fonts. The idea is that when reading simple fonts, our brains oversimplify, we start to gloss over things, and we lose concentration. Are you still with me? So if we’re reading a passage written in a font that’s harder to decipher, the task feels more difficult (called disfluency) and we think harder about what we’re doing.

This has interesting implications for designers and raises some questions about ethics. Back to the debate: by creating the flier, we’re trying to do something good for the brand (have people remember the text, which is an announcement of a call for work) and trying to do something good for the user (help them remember the content of the flier). But in order to make it easier to remember, is it really ethical if you intentionally make the flier less user friendly? Or, do you go the Arial or Helvetica route, make it more boring, but more user friendly, while potentially less memorable?

Via But Does it Float.

Golden Parachutes, RxRxR, 2009, composition gold leaf & pencil on paper, 30″x40″

Golden Parachutes, 1xRxR, 2010, composition gold leaf & pencil on paper, 30″x40″

Via Triangulation Blog.

We’ve written about various angles of Failure a number of times here at DLB. Sohrab Vossoughi has a pretty good article on how companies fail at design over at HBR. According to him, the keys to success for companies trying to innovate through design are being open to design, integrating design within the organization and broader practices, and aligning expectations before beginning any engagement or process:

The truth is there’s only so much designers can do on their own to make a company successfully innovative. Companies that misalign their expectations — and many do ignore their own part in becoming more innovative — generally fail. They genuinely want good design, and they want it to impact their bottom line, but they want it to take place externally. Their vision of design as a purely third-party service is doomed.

Vossoughi’s Five Ways to Fail at Design are as follows:

1. Refusing to change.
As Paul might say, “to make an omelet, you have to break a few eggs.” Here it applies to a company’s willingness to change internally. If you are asking designers to innovate, you have to be willing to change things besides just the design.

2. Designing outside of your innovation space.
Nick said it before – designers alone can’t dream up strengths or competencies just by “doing design”. If you want to innovate, make sure you innovate within your capabilities, and that you can actually execute. In other words, design alone will not save you.

3. Trying to design for everybody.
If you don’t know who your users are, you can’t design for them. You can’t always make everyone happy, and you shouldn’t try. From my experience, often companies don’t know who their users are, they don’t even know who they want their users to be. These are important distinctions and the key to helping designers create things that actually work.

4. Insist on replicating another company’s success
Says Vossoughi: “An Apple-like experience delivered by a company that isn’t Apple can’t be sustained, because it’s not backed up by Apple’s culture and resources. The result is an inconsistent experience that feels disingenuous to customers, and shatters their loyalty.”

5. Compartmentalizing design into isolated tasks.
Designing piecemeal is designing without context, and it usually doesn’t work. Clients might see this segmented approach as a cheap way to redesign, but you can’t just put a shiny new logo on a poorly designed product or service and expect it to be golden. If pieces are designed, executed, and launched in chunks, the result will quickly become a patched together, inconsistent experience, which dilutes your brands and confuses customers.

But on this last point, realistically I recognize that many companies and clients approach design from this angle – they just want a new look, or a part of a website redesigned, or one new product. So some of the responsibility is still on us, as designers, to make the most of every project.

Vossoughi closes:

Good design can indeed lift a company’s performance from lackluster to outstanding, but it’s still just one element in the overall system. The key to getting what you need from design is letting it influence, and be influenced by, the other elements in that system.

This is a very cool project archiving common symbols that are globally recognizable, free, and simple – a useful resource for designers or anyone who needs a good visual language reference.