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Spent a whole afternoon reworking a bakery logo in Tulsa
I'm helping a friend with her new cupcake shop, and their original logo had this tiny, curly font that looked like a spider web when printed small. After 3 tries with thicker lines and a simpler cupcake icon, she said "Now that's something I can put on a napkin." Has anyone else had to fight a client to ditch a fancy font for legibility?
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phoenix8453d ago
It's wild how often people default to fancy fonts thinking it looks pro when really it just makes everything harder to read. Your friend's napkin test is smart, feels like most design choices should be judged by how they work in real life not just on a screen. Glad she came around after a few tries, sometimes the simplest solution wins.
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james_butler2d ago
That first paragraph there, I'm gonna push back a little. My brother runs a small print shop in Cleveland and he sees the opposite all the time - people picking the most boring, default fonts because they think "simple" is always better. The napkin test works fine for things like menus or flyers, but it falls apart for branding or anything that needs to stand out in a crowd. A lot of those fancy fonts look bad on a napkin but pop on a storefront sign or a website header because they're meant for bigger spaces. Plus some of those classic serif fonts are actually easier to read in print than the basic sans-serif stuff everyone defaults to now. I guess it depends on the context, but I feel like we're losing something when we judge everything by how it looks on a napkin.
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