The 5 Deadly Design Sins: Sin #3

#3 Jazz up your layout with cool Photoshop effects. Photoshop is a wonderful program. And those of us who’ve been designing for a while know that quite a few versions back, Adobe added the ability to apply effects to editable type, and the type could still be edited. What an achievement! What a cool new world! What an invitation to design disaster.

Here is some perfectly fine type, set in Georgia:

Here is the same type, given the Photoshop treatment:

I cringed making that.

There is no reason in the world, except for illustrating this point, that type should be corrupted like that. It’s not better or cooler — it’s just ugly.

There is no shortcut to good design. If your page is looking flat or boring, adding an effect won’t save it for you. It’s a mistaken idea that the computer does the design, and the designer is the one who knows how to push the right keys. Here’s a story:

My husband is an incredible artist and engineer. He does some really amazing work in Illustrator. One day his friend called asking for help with his own Illustrator artwork.

“What’s the problem?” my husband, J, asked.

“It doesn’t look as good as yours,” friend A answered.

“Here’s what you can do…” J started explaining about vector images, gradients, and transparencies.

“I don’t want to do all that. Isn’t there a shortcut?” said A.

“You mean you want to know where to find the ‘make it cool’ button?” J asked.

“Yes.”

“There’s no make it cool button! That was a joke!”

“Oh. Then this isn’t very fun.”

There’s no make it cool button. Not even the Photoshop filters.