The Serial Killer Exhibition World Tour that killed design! 🔪

I’m sure I’m not the only designer who can’t help scrutinising the information panels at exhibitions…

I recently visited the Serial Killer Exhibition in London (weirdly fascinating, and not a cheap ticket either).

But while the life-like models and props were gruesomely impressive, I found myself horrified by something else … the design.

Here’s what caught my eye (and not in a good way):

🔪 White font on pale backgrounds 👀

🔪 Sentences literally stuck on top of printed panels

🔪 Widow words

🔪 Inconsistent alignment

🔪 Split words

🔪 Misalignment

🔪 and of course… ALL WORDS IN CAPITALS! 😱

Serial Killer exhibition carousel.pdf

Download PDF • 1.40MB

Using all caps and low-contrast colour schemes doesn’t just look unappealing, it also makes text harder and slower to read. Lowercase letters are easier to recognise because their ascenders (as in h or l) and descenders (as in g or p) create varied shapes that help us identify words by their overall outline.

In contrast, words written in ALL CAPITALS form uniform, block-like shapes, making them more difficult to distinguish. Since capital letters tend to look more like one another, they require extra effort and time for the reader to process.

To top it all, towards the end of the 2 hours, I and several other visitors were rubbing our necks, the boards were too high up, making them uncomfortable for me at 5ft 2 to read, let alone anybody in a wheelchair.

Surely, a travelling exhibition would go through proper proofing and checks? Accessibility and readability are just as important in environments where people are trying to read and learn something