Smart design doesn't just make printed items attractive, it also makes them effective.
Eric Thomas, a Detroit marketing executive and creative director, takes pride in good design and knows the pitfalls of the other kind.
So after a gaffe seen around the world Sunday night, Thomas looked at online photos of the pageant card Steve Harvey misread when announcing Miss Colombia instead of Miss Philippines as Miss Universe at the end of a live telecast.
"A much better design could’ve saved a lot of heartache," he says in a LinkedIn post drawing more than 1.4 million readers and written about by media as far as Australia, Malaysia and the Philippines.
The Detroiter, senior parnter at the nine-month-old Saga marketing agency on Gratiot downtown, shows and slams the card Harvey got (right):
Welcome to the silliest and most sloppily arranged piece of design to hit a multi-million dollar, overproduced, international beauty pageant to date. This is like showing up in flip-flops to the Oscars. And with months in the making, and thousands of hours worth of prep time, how did this part get overlooked? . . .
This mistake isn’t Steve Harvey’s fault. The culprit here is, once again, bad design.
At his Facebook page, he adds: "We have an elimination card designed by an intern in the dark on a calculator."
While lots of instant critics kicked Harvey and pageant producers, Thomas also offers the free redesign advice shown here.
I took 20 minutes of my time to try and get this right. . . . "2015 Miss Universe” is now way more obvious. . . . Everything is easier to read and follow. . . . [It's] legible, clean, and focused. By using size and color, we’ve made this document a lot more easy to understand.
His post, headlined "How Bad Design Wrecked Steve Harvey's 'Universe'," has 6,700 "likes" and over 2,100 comments -- including one from LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner and another from the CEO of Skidmore Studio in downtown Detroit. Tim Smith, Skidmore's owner, posts: "You nailed this and elegantly demonstrated how the use of good design can make a huge difference. Nice."
Thomas studied graphic design at Henry Ford Community College, graduating in 2008.
