One of my current projects at work is designing a death scene investigation form. Forms are tricky and full of surprising constraints. They require important information to be relayed and gathered. Yet they need to be simple to use and easy to comprehend. It’s tricky. What typeface or type family do you use? What’s the optimal type size to get the best legibility to paper space ratio? How do you differentiate sections? How will the form be used? Where should the paper-fold go? How will the form be distributed and returned? Are there ways we can simplify it? Do we really need that question or field? Is that data needed? Two column? One column? Can we combine questions to create one field and save space? Designing forms brings with it the best and worst of design constraints.
Mostly musings on design