Web Log Costa Blanca

A last few words about fonts, before I move on to images.

Just yesterday, a new client wrote to me about my first design for their property development site: “The letters of the text are a little thin, could you please make them thicker in general, it will be easier to read I suppose?”

As it happens, her eyes were spot on. I had tried the experiment of calling first for elegant Century Gothic. This is not one of the fonts guaranteed to be on every visitor’s machine—but it’s on enough of them for me to take the chance. (I’m so tired of Verdana/Geneva and Arial/Helvetica.) She evidently had the font on her machine.

My response was of course to switch to nice chunky Verdana—again. But I pondered on the assumptions behind her request. She is a partner in a big Russian property development company operating here in Spain, and they have obviously commissioned many print designers. She clearly thought I had the kind of control over fonts that a print designer takes for granted.

And why don’t I? How come Firefox and the Mozilla project are so stand-offish about embedded fonts? There is even an ‘at-rule’ in CSS (@font-face) which is supposed to allow developers to embed fonts. The Mozilla project scorns it.

Why? To go back to an earlier post of mine, my guess is that they are all principled introverts who think that questions of visual display are beneath their notice.

If only there were a few visually stimulated extroverts on the project…

It gets worse.

I thought yesterday’s post might be of some interest to the people who publish the Bulletin. I checked their Web site, and could find no e-mail address—in 2007, no e-mail address?—just a contact form. I’ve included it (scaled down) below, so you can see what I am talking about.

I duly entered my personal name and family name, etc. After the four identifying fields there is a bigger area labelled ‘Subject’. Odd label, I thought. This is normally used for a subject field, not a message field—but I didn’t want to be picky. I entered my message in the field, and clicked on the icon labelled ‘Submit.’ And what happened?

A message appeared in the ‘Status’ field saying “Subject Required !”

This happened no matter what I entered in any field. I could not submit the form. Have a go yourself, if you don’t believe me: www.costablanca-bulletin.com. (I can’t direct you straight to the form, since it’s a Flash site, and they make all the elementary errors designers usually make with Flash sites, like not letting you identify individual pages.)

Looking at the design, my guess is that they meant to include a proper ‘Subject’ field, but overlooked it, then gave the message field an internal id such as message, while labelling it ‘Subject’ for the visitor.

As for the error message, its curtness would be unforgivable even if I had been responsible for the error. It unerringly betrays the untrained amateur—someone who thinks that Web design is about HTML and pretty pictures, rather than about designing systems for people.

This unusable form is worse than the playground-style rudeness I identified (in another site) yesterday. It shows a fundamental lack of respect for visitors on the part of the site owners—and ignorance of elementary testing procedures on the part of the designers.

One of the things I do every now and then is check out the Web sites listed in Costa Blanca publications. Some of you may have come across the free booklet called the Bulletin, which comes out once a year, and covers Altea, Benissa, Jalón, Teulada, Moraira and Calpe. There is some handy information in it, such as bus times from Calpe to the airport. (I picked up my 2007 copy recently, when I renewed my car and house insurance.)

Its own Web site is a Flash site, with a PDF copy of the printed booklet. Some thought has gone into the design, and I personally find it quite attractive—if it weren’t for the flashing text. This has been a no-no, condemned by every serious designer, since the early 1990s. It is a great pity, since it detracts from the professionalism of the site.

What really upset me, however, was the low standard of most of the Web sites listed in the publication. One of the motivations for this blog is to collaborate with other local designers in raising awareness of good design principles, for our sake and for our clients’ sake.

I may comment some more on particular sites in later posts, but one thing has to be mentioned immediately. It is unforgivable to make unfinished pages public. One site listed in the Bulletin is in German. It has little flags which link to English and Spanish versions—or rather don’t. The links go nowhere. This is an insult to visitors—like offering a handshake and then tripping the other person up, as children do on playgrounds. It also suggests the company is disorganised and amateurish.

Maybe the site owner is too busy to produce the necessary pages, or has been let down by someone else. Fine. Just keep the flags off the pages—until the pages that the flags promise are ready.