Q: What is wrong with the following sentence?

We thought the new color palate was to blue and failed too compliment the stationary design.

A: It’s a train wreck of well-intentioned designer vocabulary gone wrong.

Ever since the early days of advertising, when art and copy were handled in separate departments, it’s been a long-running joke that graphic designers can’t spell. Well, like most jokes, there’s probably a little truth to that. And, of course, with the prevalence of social media such as Twitter, Facebook, and blogging, the evidence of designer spelling deficiencies has expanded. In my opinion, in a world of auto-correct and spell-check, it’s not the traditional “typos” that designers struggle with today. It’s the homonyms (sometimes more correctly referred to as homophones). These are words that are pronounced the same but spelled differently. The issue isn’t typos, it’s the use of correctly spelled words in the wrong context.

So, just in time for the New Year, we’ve provided our top “designer vocabulary words” as a creative community service to help our fellow designers figure out which (or is that witch?) word they actually mean to use.
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