In-Lecture Exercise E

What seems to be off about this particular graphic representation?

On first glance, the text itself is extremely difficult to read. Granted, the font size is large enough to be read from a distance, however, the font itself is barely legible - white with thin, black outlines. The choice of font makes for a very unpleasant reading experience.

Unconventionally, all the words are typed in capital letters, which makes the graphic representation feel more "off". Also, the text is center-aligned with no "hard" left edge. This makes it even harder to read the text because there is no leading edge for the eye to naturally follow.  

Lastly, a minor point that I noticed is that there is no variety in type classification. Everything is Serif, and this contributes to the quirkiness of this graphic representation.

How would you improve this typographic representation?

First, I would change the font color to something far less jarring. Instead of white letters outlined in black that make for a very painful reading experience, perhaps something more applicable would be normal solid black letters (i.e. black fill and black outline or black fill and no outline).  

Next, I would change the typeface to one that is more suitable for a body of text. The current typeface seems to be suitable for one-liners (e.g. "NUS FASS" on a t-shirt) and not for whole paragraphs. Perhaps more traditional fonts like Times New Roman or Calibri would be better in this instance. 

In the same vein, I would use complementary typefaces. I would change the title to be Sans Serif, and keep the text body as Serif, which is good for running text and allows for better readability. Overall, this would make the whole graphic representation easier on the eyes. 

Regarding alignment, I would left-align the text. As alluded to previously,  the centered text makes the paragraph hard to read as the starting place of each line changes. Left-aligning the text mitigates this problem.

Finally, the current text is devoid of any color and emotion. I would change that by adding relevant graphic elements such as images, or even varying the background color of the whole graphic representation.