Hygiene

‘Hygiene factors’ is business-speak for the basics that have to be done well to avoid dissatisfaction – the things that will only be noticed if they go wrong.  

What we now call legibility research, perhaps much of what we now call user experience research, was once called ‘reading hygiene’.¹ It covered typefaces, reading distance, line length, illumination, paper colour and other conditions for reading.² It’s all the things that have to be right, even before you start to talk about content, messages, design or anything else.

Here’s graphic designer Holger Jacobs talking about the precision of Swiss modernist design:³

There is a real element of craftsmanship required to create things that are that clear and that simple … a kind of Müller-Brockmann way of doing things. I often tell my students that they can always do something that looks experimental, expressive or messy, even a bit punk, but in the end, it’s all about hygiene. I don’t say, ‘come and learn the rules’. Instead I say, ‘look. I’m not interested in teaching typographic rules’ I just expect a bit of personal hygiene: you get up in the morning and brush your teeth, maybe take a shower, put on a fresh pair of underpants. That kind of stuff. It’s the same thing with graphic design — you should know how to do decent kerning, you should know which hyphens to use, you should know the basics of typography. 

Even designers who are very expert and creative make hygiene mistakes. I have some beautiful books which turned out to have poor hygiene when I got close:

• cook books which won’t stay open
• cook books where recipes cross the page and you have to turn it with messy hands
• books with illustrations that cross the spine, and you lose half the image
• books printed in grey or silver ink that you can’t read
• books you can’t open without cracking the spine

1. Parsons, J. H. (1914). Discussion on the hygiene of reading and near vision. The British Medical Journal, 2(2799), 359-362.

2. Tinker, M. (1934). Illumination and the hygiene of reading. Journal of Educational Psychology, 25(9), 669-680.

3. Conrad, D. (2022) Interview with Holger Jacobs in Who the hell is Müller-Brockmann—Conversations about the Swiss style (pp. 87-100). Niggli.