Decluttering A Layout

Carl Shank • June 21, 2023

How do you go about decluttering or revamping a busy image? The image below was a local ad for a hardware store emphasizing lawn work equipment. The type should be easy to read and the graphics and fonts used should enhance the theme of the ad. I find the original ad "clunky" and hard to decipher what is really important. Is it the hardware store? Is it the lawn equipment? Is it the emphasis on servicing the local communities for quite some time?


One major problem is using fonts that are sized incorrectly for the ad to stand out to the viewer. The remade ad uses a family of fonts, namely Avenir Next Condensed in various styles. Using the same font clarifies and highlights rather than obscures the message of the flyer. While the revamped flyer is limited to one major font style, you can generally use as many as three fonts in a publication to keep it from being cluttered. Because of the variety of font styles in the Avenir Next family, we can have both display fonts and text fonts from the same basic font family.


About those graphics. The graphics chosen to illustrate lawn equipment are scattered, not sharp and stand in contention with the companies advertised — Toro, Echo, Husqvarna and Troy-Bilt. Are we supposed to focus on the companies or the products of these companies? That is unclear. The Hostetter logo is indeed central to the ad, but the hours of operation are not emphasized. I suppose the yellow marker used is suppose to highlight those times as well as long standing service to the community.


The point in a display ad such as this one is to increase readability and invite the reader to investigate what is being offered. The revamped ad does this in a clean and clear way.

Successful Layout & Design

More On The Greek Font

By Carl Shank • December 23, 2025
More on the Greek font. In a previous post ( It's Greek To Me! March 18, 2023) we noted that Cursive Greek type appeared as a chancery script by Francesco Griffo in 1502 and lasted two hundred years. Robert Bringhurst notes that "chancery Greeks were cut by many artists from Garamond to Cason, but Neoclassical and Romantic designers . . . all returned to simpler cursive forms . . . in the English speaking world the cursive Greek most often seen is the one designed in 1806 by Richard Porson." This face has been the "standard Greek face for the Oxford Classical Texts for over a century." ( Robert Bringhurst, The Elements of Typographic Style, Hartley & Marks, Version 3.1, 2005 , pp. 274, 278) In fact, asking Google for the best Greek face to use, it points us to Porson Greek. Porson is a beautiful Unicode Font for Greek. It's not stiff, like many of the cleaner fonts, which are usually san serif. It is bold and easy to read and seems to more closely match the orthography in newer textbooks. (Jan 8, 2004) 

Newest Decorative Font: Nabel Dado

By Carl Shank • December 22, 2025
CARE Typography is pleased to announce a new typeface — NabelDado — in standard black-and-white font formulation as well as colored SVG formats. Please see samples below. Order from cshanktype@gmail.com. Enjoy!
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