The initial instinct was to find a way to flip the script on the able bodied by creating a design that would favor the margins of ability. While this would have been great in theory, all attempts to do so failed. They failed not so much because they weren’t clever or well intentioned, but because at the end of the day contemporary, concept driven graphic design is largey inaccessible. Furthermore, most people living with disabilities are already using software to interpret the chaos of the web for them.

We went through an exhaustive design process trying to find the way to make it anything other than a straight-foreword exercise in legibility. I became fascinated with web accessibility standards and color schemes that often fell outside of the good taste cannon. We thought it would be cool to really lean in to the reality of accessibility on the web. We tried using image ID tags (then unheard of by most nice liberals) as top level typography, garish but accessible color schemes, wacky diagrams that were indecipherable without captions and even typography that was impossible to read without the tools used by visually impaired readers…to name a few.

Even then, we still somehow hadn’t exhausted the burning desire to do something clever so for the first edition of the publication, printed on the occasion of the CPNY conference in Philly, where the project was to be presented, we designed the book sideways. The idea was that by foregoing the convention of orientation we would make a statement by inconveniencing able bodied non-profit art-workers. We also estimated that the type size could be larger with a wider column width.

promiseandpractice.art