Discussion 3: Bad Typography Is everywhere
Insignia has one of the worst box typography I’ve ever had to deal with, and to tell you why let me first tell you the story of how I found it. Right before the semester started, my old laptop gave out in a big way. It had fried the motherboard after it heated to well over 93°C (199.4°F). I ended up buying a new computer obviously, and 2 monitors. My computer, however, only took one HDMI cable and had 3 ports for Display Port, while both my monitors were HDMI. This meant I needed at least one HDMI to Display-Port cable. This is where the fun began.
Pictured is a HDMI-to-HDMI cable, but it doesn’t matter, because they’re all roughly like this. Imagine a scenario where you’re at BestBuy, and you have a wall of these boxes about 6ft tall and 10ft long. See that tiny little “HDMI Cable” in the corner? That’s the information you need. Hidden away as small as they could make it, in a color that nearly blends in with the white background from a distance. Meanwhile, other less pertinent information is larger and more central, such as the 6ft in length and the 4K text.
Speaking upon the 4K text, you also can’t read that to save your life. Again, you’d be standing a good distance away with about 50 of these boxes all next to another, why on earth is it an outline that’s colored grey on a white background? What’s worse, is that it’s completely pointless, especially if you don’t know what cable it is since again the cable name is hidden up at the top right. I should clarify, yes, anyone can walk closer and read the small texts… but are you really going to do that for every single cable type in the store? No, I don’t think one should have to. It took me 15 minutes to find the cable I needed, and I already knew exactly what I needed and where it was in the store.
That’s what, in my opinion, makes the typography so bad on this company’s boxes. To sell a product, you must be able to read it. All I would do is swap the positions of HDMI Cable and the 4k @ 60Hz information and change the font color to dark blue. Though it might look a bit forced, it would fix the problem at hand.
