McCain and Fonts
Today I saw a picture of John McCain and Joe Lieberman and wondered if he had chosen him as his running mate.
I ended up at one of the Republican senator’s websites, and was simply shocked at the poor use of typography I found. Consistency is not a hallmark at JohnMcCain.com.
In purple-red at the top, we have his logo set in Optima. I don’t have an issue with this, but let’s be consistent. That’s the last of Optima we find.
In blue, in the ad, we have Adobe Trajan. It’s poorly kerned, if you ask me.
In the white/light blue of the menu bar, of course, we don’t get to choose our fonts; we have to use some nice “web-safe” fonts. So here we get what looks like Trebuchet Bold. Not bad. But why not use it elsewhere?
Then in the “Biden” section, green and yellow, back to Adobe Myriad. The main title I surrounded in green could have been better done. I would have put the “Fact Center” blurb lower, and spaced it out… more.
In purple under “news” we get yet another sans-serif font! Nothing a like a little Arial to round off the page.
So, in short, McCain’s website suffers in the design department by breaking a basic, cardinal rule in print or web design: don’t use every damn font! You’re better off with a better, overall balance of design by a conservative choice from your font library. While any one of these fonts would have been great for the basic choice, save for Trajan which only has capitals, I would have kept the Optima for the logo, and used a more common web-font for the rest, with an emphasis on consistency between the different areas highlighted on the page.
In case you are wondering, Obama’s site isn’t perfect either, but it does have a more consistent use of Gotham, the font used for his logo throughout the site.