Wednesday, March 01, 2017

Oscars and Butterfly Ballots

Vox has a good piece by Benjamin Bannister analyzing the design of the Oscar card.  It, along with the infamous "butterfly ballot" of 2000, shows the importance of design.  I won't say the Oscar card is a bureaucratic "form", but I won't say it isn't.

When I joined ASCS in 1968 it had a strong form design shop, with Chet Adell, Tom Sager, and Linda Nugent.  I remember Chet's pride in some of the forms they'd designed, particularly the Farm Record Card (ASCS-156) which moved historical data to a farm-based form from a series of listing sheets, so the clerk, as they were known then, could refer to one document for a farm rather than several. 

As someone has said, the "devil's in the details", and good forms designers sweat the details.

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