Little things make messes

Sometimes, I bet people wonder about why my critiques so often make fiddly little adjustments to posters. Surely such tiny little things don’t matter that much, right?

Ever been someplace where everything is neatly laid out and organized... but it’s dusty?

Dust particles are tiny. No one speck of dust is a problem. But en masse, they make a place look bad. Even if the big things are perfectly in place.

All those little errors on a poster – the misaligned edges, the objects almost touching, the awkward spacing in fully justified lines – all add up and all make a poster look messy.

Unfortunately, for poster design, there is no simple “sweep” that is equivalent to dusting. You have to attend to each of those details individually.