If you can announce the Higgs Boson in Comic Sans, clearly anybody can do anything.

I think once the artistic world of the type designer merged with the scientific world of the computer programmer, you began to see this crossover.

If typography is calling attention to itself, it's taking that attention away from what the words are saying.

The problem contains the solution.

It's hard to predict what will happen as reading on screen becomes more of a universal norm, and when the formats dictated by social media - Twitter's 140-character limit, for instance - start to influence what we're used to.

Certain kinds of typeface design and typographic design are designed to persuade: we can make this company look modern if we use a crisp sans serif typeface, or we can make this restaurant look like its been around forever if we use typefaces and layout styles that have been around forever too. But there are other categories, and ballot design is one of them, where the goal should be to be purely functional. There have been notable failures in this category.

A good cook can make something amazing out of even the blandest ingredients. Still, you don't want to eat the exact same dish every day.