Sacrafice creativity…? Hardly.

I’m working on a suite of publications for a retiree event, and this was included in the project description:

Important Note: since retirees are the primary audience for all [event] materials, please make sure all text is large enough and designed in a way to maximize legibility. Even if that means you have to sacrifice some creativity, it has to be readable by this generally older group.

I appreciated the note and duly made the text bigger to meet the special needs of the audience. While “maximizing legibility” is more-or-less innate to graphic design and shouldn’t need a reminder, the special request on this project got me thinking….

The tension between function and form is what makes design an exciting field (and why I’ll probably never be a painter…). You can’t innovate as a designer just by relying on pleasing aesthetic forms. The form must respond to the project’s desired function (in this case, legibility for retirees).

Is this sacrificing creativity? Absolutely not. In this dance of form and function there is no sacrifice. In fact, you need more creativity, not less, to break out your moves on this dance floor…