Alexa, play “Make It Better (feat. Smokey Robinson)” by Anderson .Paak
The only thing worse than looking at something that’s poorly designed is knowing that just a few small edits would make it infinitely better.
Here are a couple times when the tweaks were too obvious to ignore. And I had too much free time. And so I couldn’t keep my hands off.
Brown Alumni Magazine (BAM), November/December 2018
Theirs:
This headline package is hard to read correctly and easy to read wrong. Also, the blue spot coloring in the byline seems unnecessary, though this might just be in their stylesheet.
Mine:
Disclaimer: my re-design is certainly not ready for print—the headline runs right through the gutter! But I changed the shape and spacing of the headline to give it a nice relationship with itself. I also took the color out of the byline.
Theirs:
The biggest faux pas here is the dom photo; the clumsy crop makes it lose all its power. It’s no small loss, either. This photo has potential to be immense.
They also don’t need the vertical line in the copy; a pica of white space is plenty to create that column. In fact, adding the line makes the column weaker.
Mine:
Look at this headshot. Look at his gaze. This is the crop that should have happened. (Unfortunately, I wasn’t working with the actual file, so I had to settle for a suspicious Photoshop job on the right side. But let’s ignore that for now.) This crop makes power ooze from the page, instead of letting it fall off.
And the column is much more powerful without a vertical line undermining it.
Theirs:
There wasn’t much to change on this page. We have the same vertical lines in the copy, which should certainly be taken off the stylesheet. The copy is also in danger of dropping off the bottom of the page.
Mine:
Again, the columns look much better without the vertical lines, and they’re well-supported by a cushion of white space on the bottom of the page.
The Nook Breakfast Spot’s menu
Theirs:
This menu is wildly long. It’s exciting since I love big breakfast, but it’s also a challenging layout problem. The main issue is that it’s hard to travel through this menu quickly; something this long needs to be skimmable. I did like the categories with big, bold titles: House Specialties, Omelettes, etc.
Otherwise, many ideas here are great but not executed strongly enough. The ‘2 Eggs’ menu is actually harder to find at the very top of the page. The bolding and indents are not pronounced enough, which is actively more confusing.
I like the newspaper concept, but it’s again not strong enough. The fully justified text just creates confusing white space, and the newspaper heading is somewhat pointless (but cute, so I kept it around). The logo, on the other hand… double eggs with janky, pointy edges? I don’t know about that one.
Mine:
I basically recreated what they did, but stronger. I boosted their bolding and exaggerated their indents, so there is no confusion about where each menu item starts. Since they were already printing in multiple colors, I wasn’t worried about extra cost when using the orange spot color to make section titles stand out.
I moved the 2 Eggs section down to the rest of the menu. If they want to highlight these further, they could put a light orange box behind it.
I find this new version much more skimmable, and there was no information lost between the two (just a couple of illustrations)! Hopefully this is pleasing to my fellow big breakfast lovers who want to read the whole menu quickly.