Design Changes Criticized

I note with dismay the new format of your Life & Style and Calendar sections. Surely, the author of these typographic disasters works in secret for the Orange County Register.

The formerly clear and easily read section and feature headings have been replaced with hard-to-distinguish red-on-gray and black-on-gray blurs. How convenient. To find the features I enjoy and look for in the paper, I now have to read the first few lines, since the contrast is too low for me, with aging eyes, to distinguish letter forms.

Did someone fail to notice the simple fact that letter forms in every human alphabet or script are patterns of dark on light and depend for legibility on high contrast, especially as one gets older? Or is this a high-minded attempt to evoke a sympathetic sense of illiteracy in your readership to encourage it to support reading programs for the blind?

From all the demographics I’ve seen, your older readership is the most loyal and likely to subscribe in the first place. Did anyone stop to think what effect this silly change might have on them? Did anyone ask? Or was this idea dreamed up by someone whose vision is 20/20 and whose idea of fine typography was nurtured on Batman graphic novels?

Hard-to-read letter forms and convoluted efforts to bury text within artwork belong in experimental comic books, not newspapers.

LEE PHILLIPS

Dana Point