LadyGypsy.net – the blog of Kimberly Dowd of New Jersey

Hey, check it out!

Uh, dishwasher detergent capsules?

Cascade changed its font! The old one’s on the left. Newer bag on the right.

It’s subtle, but to a dork like me who notices fonts, it hit me like a ton of bricks.

The “a” has changed – that curve over top a lowercase a is called a double-story. That curve’s gone now. They also slimmed down the letters – you can really notice that on the letter d. They also slightly increased the spacing between the letters.

And not font related, it looks like the cascading water was downgraded into a gentle swish.

I get excited when I notice logo changes – but only the subtle ones – not huge ones like Gap’s ill-fated foray into…plain. I once took a cellphone picture of two San Giorgio spaghetti boxes side by side so I could show people that they were going from title case to small caps. And people looked at me as if I was showing them a moth collection.

Ah, well. I’m sure there are people just like me out there, excited about this thing. But they most likely hang in insular little font communities where people like me with no formal design training and difficulty remembering the differences between Arial and Helvetica* aren’t welcome.

What kind of silly things do you notice that nobody else seems to care about?

* One had a film made about it. And yes, I watched it.

Part of my job at the Courier-Post involves designing online advertising. I’m not sure how exactly that came about other than when I started there, I was one of two people with Photoshop.

Back then, the most common (and I believe only) ad size on our site was this:

Now as monitors get larger, web sites get larger and of course the ads get larger. Someone has to make sure the lowly web folk get paid.

Anyway, I saw THIS ad today:

Clicky to embiggen!

and I totally wish I designed that. I have no formal design experience, but I know that ads shouldn’t be cluttered, and the main point of a banner ad is to get someone to click on it.

(It’s for Merry Maids, by the way.)

I wish I could express that better to people who want me to make the artwork smaller so I can fit their fax number on the ad.

**

Dream 1: There is a form I need to fill out for work and the deadline is midnight. It’s about 11:55 pm, and I’m at work, dashing through the cubicle maze in the dark and trying desperately to find that form. I’m running into chairs and desks and filing cabinets and I’m in a full-fledged panic.

Then my work PC suddenly goes into an 8-bit display mode, and begins to run programs. It’s been hacked! “It’s the South Koreans,” an unfamiliar IT person tells me. “They’re always doing this sh-t.”

Dream 2: I’m a lawyer trying to get the death penalty overturned for somebody. It’s a race against the clock as they are literally prepping my client for execution while I recite my plea to the judge.

This dream is courtesy of the execution of the Virginia sniper. I’m anti-death penalty, no matter what, so whenever a capital punishment sentence is carried out, I’m subconsciously very upset about it.