Monday 15 October 2012

mortising or between spaces, no one can hear you kern

Perhaps I am a bit behind the curb in noticing but I haven’t visited the auction site in a few weeks and mostly prefer my old fall-back local flea-markets—not that I only visit like a desperate madman on his way to a Secret-Santa holiday office party and we do regularly find some incredible pieces there—but I am really displeased with the choice the eBay made with its new typeface.

 It looks like something that I could manage in PowerPoint (not to disparage what one can create with that platform either). The redesign conveys nothing, and I find it a little remarkable that the typesetting of the clothing retailer GAP (which I have no connection with) made its way to the headlines here, among others, with protests in the streets that forced the company to redact those changes, condemned to have never happened and no one is allowed to speak of, fleet-footed but there’s nothing about the decision of a multinational’s altered appearance.  Marketers ought to be careful about messing with an established look.