Moustache - EINSTEIN'S WAS SMALLER THAN MINE. HIS IQ WASN'T.

I have been trained in typography and that can sometimes lead to a lot of frustrations.

Badly kerned type (the space between letters) is one of my pet gripes, as is over leading (the space between lines of type) and an incessant use of capital letters in headlines.

Just look at any American newspaper and you’ll get my drift regarding the last complaint.

There are many more that annoy me but these are a hinderance to legibility and therefore communication, and that pisses me off.

All this training has its downfalls.

I am so used to reading a page, according to the rule of hierarchy. And when it’s not applied properly I misread things.

Hierarchy is the order in which elements are placed on a page. It’s another technique typographers and designers use to aid comprehension.

When pages of type are designed by people who have English as a second language it becomes even more frustrating for me.

By not fully understanding the language, the designers place the elements in the wrong order and that disrupts my comprehension.

I spent five minutes looking for a particular item on a menu, until I discovered it was there right under my nose.

This isn’t their fault, it’s mine.

The problem is that it doesn’t follow my rules and I was blind to it being done another way.

It’s time to throw the rule book out and start to see things for what they are, not what I expect them to be.