All medicines are information dependent. Many medicines are poorly designed. In many instances the leaflets, labels and other information we design for people to use these medicines are compensating for the poor quality of the medicines’ design. A couple of examples:

• A medicine used to treat osteoporosis (thinning of the bones) is coated with a non-active ingredient that will burn your throat if it lodges temporarily after being swallowed. The highly-usable instructions we designed instruct the medicine user not only to remain upright during and immediately after taking the medicine, but also to walk about. Typically the medicine is used by frail older people not given to much walking about. Our beautifully-designed information is a prosthesis compensating for the poor design of the medicine.
• One of the smorgasbord of medicines used to treat HIV has to be taken at regular intervals, three times a day, one hour before food; others have to be taken at different intervals. Our highly-usable, clear instructions make it less likely that people will do the wrong thing. As before, our beautifully designed information is a prosthesis compensating for the poor design of the medicine.

I was prompted to write this blog after reading a recent announcement from the FDA that they had just approved the first once-a-day three-drug combination tablet for treatment of HIV. Hallelujah! This is only ten years after we designed our beautiful prosthesis for a poorly-designed medicine. The technology for making better medicines—controlled slow release etc—is well established. I can even buy controlled slow release fertilizer for my garden! The issue is incorporating such technology into the design of the medicine. In the case of the HIV medicine it involved getting a number of companies with patents in particular products to work together.

I could go on at great length. The point I want to make is about design in general, not just information design. One of the dominant ways of thinking about design derives from the romantic tradition within fine arts. Design, it is thought, is a harmonious, beautiful bringing-together of form and function for a purpose. Within that purpose—within the frame or on the plinth, as it were—we have a beautiful object, a perfect solution. Whether the design is for a toaster, a building, or a medicine instruction, there is a fanciful notion that a ‘good’ design is one that looks like a harmonious perfect solution on its own, a panacea.

But nothing is on its own, unrelated to other things. Isolating something in this way is a human conceit, an act of framing, of pretending that such ‘solutions’ enable us all to live happily ever after. In some instances this pretence is harmless enough. But in many instances it can be misleading to suggest that a design is a panacea when it is really a prosthesis for something else that is not working well. Not that there is anything wrong with designing prostheses. It only becomes wrong if we think we have developed a ‘solution’ rather than a temporary fix. And contrary to the dominant and romantic view, most of what we designers do is tinkering and temporarily fixing.

At least once a month, sometimes more often, I get asked, “Which font should we use for our web site or documents: serif or sans serif”? And at least once a month I give the same answer, “I think you are asking the wrong question, at the wrong time”.

Not very helpful, I must admit. But there is a good reason. Let me explain by way of some analogies.

About the time that researchers were asking about the differences between serif and sans serif, other researchers were asking whether white people were more intelligent than black. Typography is not quite as controversial as race (unless you’re a professional typographer) but one of the questions one asks as a professional researcher in any area is why is a particular difference worth measuring—whether it’s the difference between serif and sans serif fonts or white and black people.

If you mix with lots of fonts, just as when you mix with lots of people of different colour, you discover many subtleties of quality. All serifs are not the same, just as all whites are not the same, and—shock horror—some fonts, like some people, are not purely one or the other. There are mongrel fonts in our midst that might be better on some occasions than the pure bred!

The point is that life is subtle and asking the question whether we should use serifs or sans serifs is as crude as asking whether or not we should employ only whites or blacks. The question tells us more about the person asking it than it does about the question topic.

At one of Europe’s leading design schools, students doing their undergraduate degree were allowed to use only one family of fonts for everything: Univers. This may seem a bit extreme, but it did mean that students got to know well at least one major font family. Later, if they worked with other fonts, they were likely to realise that they needed to get to know a new family in some depth before they were able to use it appropriately.

But there are other reasons why the question of serif vs sans serif is not a good one.

Douglas Adams’s Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy has a lovely exchange between a marketing person and Arthur Dent (one of the main characters), set in a Stone Age Earth: Arthur has been sneering at the marketer, saying that she and her companions (telephone sanitizers and hairdressers) have spent six months in committee, and they haven’t so far managed to invent the simplest of technologies, the wheel. Holding up a hexagonal, varicoloured object, she turns on Arthur and says: “Ok wise guy, you tell us what colour it should be!”

Well, people who ask me about which fonts to use are a bit like the marketing person. This is a choice one makes AFTER one has made some rather more important decisions like:
• what do you want people to do with the document?
• what different types of task are they going to want to undertake?
and so on…

And going back to my first analogy: it’s a good idea to develop a precise job description for an employee and then recruit someone who can do the job, rather than start the job description by saying only serifs need apply.