Survey Archaeology and Forms

Anyone who has done archaeology lately knows that we almost spend as much time looking at form (or its digital equivalent) as the trench, survey unit, landscape, or architectural feature. In general, forms are unattractive and at best functional (at worst, they are overwhelming belches of blank lines, boxes, and cryptic instructions. 

Tomorrow the 2015 Western Argolid Regional Project season starts. We had a few little tweaks to make to the database and that led to some tweaking of the form and that led to some modifications in its appearance. 

I’m sure I’m violating several laws of graphic design in my efforts, but I think I’ve improved our forms legibility and added a bit of style. The font is Prime; it’s a free, sans serif, highly geometric font which adds some bling without encroaching too much on the utility of the form. 

I also tried to standardize the placement of boxes. Almost all archaeological forms that I’ve encountered try to do too much in too little space. For WARP, we want to keep the form to a front and back page. So I tried to find ways to negotiate the constrained space of the form so that it was a little bit easier to follow and I tried to play a bit with orientation by extending some things to the right of the margin and some boxes to the left (in an orderly way) to index the form a bit and to give some more room for the free text boxes.