A very personal contribution to forms design

So it's been a while... But for extremely good reasons. I got to know plenty more reassuringly everyday pregnancy terms, including lightening and show (don't ask). And after 36 hours, I also gained a very thorough appreciation of why it's called labour. Anyway, the outcome, in the shape of our beautiful baby boy complete with long fluttery eyelashes, was a pretty darn fine result.

When designing forms and laser printed documents, we always need to check that long names will fit. Sometimes there's a system reason, such as field lengths, but more often it's simply a matter of space. The name and address, particularly on laser-printed documents, are often viewed as something of a nuisance - something to squirrel away in an unobtrusive corner while we get on with looking at the interesting stuff. But they still need to fit. I'm not aware that anyone has conducted a review of all surnames in the UK and found a number of characters that will cater for 90% of them, so we pretty much use common sense. We often have favourite long names that we'll use to test fit - for years our old company used Professor Christopher Fotherington-Smythe, which for some reason was always mis-spelled. So (obviously) purely in the name of information design, my boy has a whopping 30 character name that - so far - doesn't fit on any form you care to name. The things I do for form design.