It was fascinating to watch that video demonstrating exactly how much effort goes into traditional type-setting. At first I was impatient with the beginning of the course – I wanted to jump right into InDesign immediately. But as I saw more of the manual processes involved, I was forced to observe the subtle intricacies that go into selecting typefaces and setting them to design words. I understood more of how letter shapes flow and what makes each typeface unique – which are things I took for granted in the past.

Let’s start with the bad. http://www.baruch.cuny.edu/careers/

Unfortunately, I had to choose our own Starr Career Development Center’s homepage for the bad design. It isn’t necessarily ugly, but it is very confusing and convoluted. It fails in its primary purpose – to inform. It is an absolute pain to navigate the site, and pages with resources are laborious to navigate. Students typically just go right to StarrSearch since that is readily available. Suffice it to say, the poor design means that many incredible resources are unknown to most of the student body. Even if you know what you’re looking for, it is hard to discover it.

http://momconfessionals.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/ebaynow.png

For good design, I actually went with the eBay ads from the NYC Subway system. They are very clean, crisp, and clear – you can read them from a mile away. Plus, the use of white space not only gives it this elegant feeling, but ironically makes it pop out against the other ads which are usually very crowded. Illustrations are used effectively.