Design Vigilantes
“Bring bad design to justice!” So command the Design Police.
It’s already old news that technology has placed the ability to commit design atrocities well within reach of the grubby hands of the masses, but as Sam Clemens remarked about folks who complain about the weather, “no one does anything about it“.
Until now.
The pen may be mightier than the sword, but even more potent is the bright red sticker! Scatter that justice around for the piddling price of a color printout.
The five pages of labels are frighteningly on-target … “unnecessary use of a Photoshop effect” popped right out at me, but there’s a category here for just about every offense against design, from abjurations to consult a designer to one of my own hobby-horses, “the inch glyph is NOT a speech mark”.
This is just the latest example of an irritable minority trying to maintain order in the printed public sphere, I suppose. Lynne Truss, grammar-fascist author of “Eats, Shoots and Leaves; The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation” has long advocated carrying a Sharpie around for the correction of publicly misplaced apostrophes — and she is far from alone.
Can excess in the pursuit of good design be called a vice? Take matters into your own hands — red-sticker vigilante justice is the kind I can finally get behind.
