What about visual correctness? - aesthetics and readability rules for publication design - Look of the Book - Column

I'm not sure who came up with that fortunate phrasing " Political Correctness," used to describe the movement on college campuses and elsewhere that limits thought and free speech. Everette E. Dennis, executive director of the Freedom Forum Media Studies Center, New York (formerly the Gannett Foundation Media Center), thinks the coiner of the phrase was Richard Bernstein, a New York Times reporter. Professor William Lingle of Linfield College, McMinnville, Ore., whose scholarly activities take him into film criticism and theory, says he encountered the term frequently in the mid-and late-1980s "as a means of scolding filmmakers and scholars for not toeing the Party Line. It was appropriated in all seriousness by the academic left from the more overtly political left to ... discipline the faithful and punish the enemy," he says in a journal distributed at Linfield. With Political Correctness in mind, Lingle, a liberal in the traditional sense, talks about "the swift move toward hell that academia has taken."

The term became pejorative as the three major U.S. news magazines along with The New Republic reported the movement in 1991.

Political Correctness touches people in the media as well as those in education. USA Today columnist Barbara Reynolds say she feels as if there's "some angelic nanny perched over my word processor warning me to cut my best lines." She concludes: "If we have to wait until we're guiltless to poke fun at others and if everybody's a laugh-proof 'victim,' maybe the joke's on us."

Political Correctness covers -- or can cover -- not only what we say and write but also what we choose as art and illustration.

Art direction faces correctness edicts of still another kind. These concern aesthetics and readability. Enter Visual Correctness.

The industry faces endless seminars -and, uh, monthly columns in communication magazines -- reciting rules on how pages should be laid out and illustrated. Rules like: Outline all your photographs, don't use an assortment of typefaces in a single issue, don't let a photograph face off the page, don't reverse body copy in art areas.

Fortunately, art directors become bored with the rules, however defensible they may be. So every once in a while we see pages like those shown here from Healthy Pet, published by Veterinary Medicine Publishing Company, Lenexa, Kan., for veterinarians for distribution to their clients. In what some might consider an affront to readability and a celebration of cuteness, the editors use Carmen Reed's full-page silhouette drawings to double up on art and copy. The pages are all line art; at the same time they are all copy. They are not what you'd want to see often in a magazine, probably -- but they are okay if saving space and segregating subject matter and looking different from other pages are important. One of these pages was a righthartder for a two-page spread on "Feline Health Watch," the other a right-hander for a two-page spread on "Canine Health Watch." Presumable the cat lover will read the one spread, the dog lover the other.

Unlike Political Correctness, Visual Correctness allows a modicum of playfulness and puts up with occasional deviation from what most of us have come to regard as good design.

Roy Paul Netson, professor of journalism at the University of Oregon, is the author of a number of books on design, art, media and writing, including "Publication Design" (Wm. C. Brown Publishers, Dubuque, Iowa).

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