The Maddening Tiny Print on Products
Type is often so small on labels and packages, it can be dangerous to your health
There’s no doubt about it: Aging is not kind to our eyes. Nor, I believe, are product manufacturers.
In their eagerness to create new and fancy products, they often overlook the optical needs of older consumers. Sometimes that oversight is just a small daily annoyance. But as in case of my friend, it can also have potentially dangerous consequences.
Ask a graphic designer why the print on so many products is so small, and the answer is: the young designers themselves. As Gregg Davis, president of the Columbus, Ohio innovation consulting firm Design Central, told me: “Young designers want to reinvent the world, but they have none of the encumbrances of eyesight challenges. So it’s very difficult for them to imagine why fine print should be an issue.”
Designers also say government regulations and lawyers have helped turn boxes, bottles, and instruction manuals into a fine-print tour de force by demanding so much information that the print must be small to accommodate it. Otherwise, the packaging and manuals would be too big and costly.
As a result, in some manuals – think of your iPhone or iPad – the font is so small it measures one-sixteenth of an inch, or “a smidge taller than the thickness of a single dime,” according to a recent SmartMoney story: Attack of the Fine Print.
One other explanation: the increasingly global marketplace. Says Marianne Grisdale, creative manager of the Chicago based TEAMS Design USA: “A lot of companies are trying to go global and that means trying to fit text in several languages into one document or one bottle to meet each country’s regulations.”
A handful of companies are slowly moving in the right direction.
Design and legibility experts say technology offers hope.
“Technology is way ahead of the print world,” says Dorrie Rush, Marketing Director, Accessible Technology for Lighthouse International, a nonprofit fighting vision loss. “On almost every major mobile device on the market today, you can adjust the print, the font size, the boldness and the contrast. In some cases, you can turn on speech if you can’t read it.”
