Typography magazine carolina rivera spring 2015 by Carolina Rivera

N°13 MAY 2015 TYPE CASTING

STEVEN BROWER WHAT I LEARNED

GROOMING THE FONT LEGAL CONSIDERATIONS

TYPOGRAPHY STYLE

TYPE CUBE

TYPOGRAPHY SOLUTION TYPE FORMS

TYPESOURCE informing // connecting // relevant BACK TO BASICS

STOPPING SLOPPY TYPOGRAPHY

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TYPESOURCE informing // connecting // relevant

CONTENTS 4

TYPE CASTING

Steven Brower his experiences in book design at American Library.

10 GROOMING THE FONT

Legal considerations , Ethical and Aesthetic Considerations by Robert Bringhurst.

14 TYPE CUBE

Exploration Type forms,

18 BACK TO BASICS

Stopping Sloppy Typography by John D. Berry.

20 OPINION

How Good is Good?

22 BUSINESS

Taking your Fonts to Market: Foundry or Reseller?

24 TYPEFACE REVIEW Velo Serif

26 PRACTICAL TIPS

Typography in 10 minutes

28 WEB TYPE

Abandone 5 obsolete habits by Mike Butterick.

Type Casting It was exactly where I wanted to be. What I Learned So, when I made my entry into the elite world of literature, I began in the “bullpen” of a massmarket house. I believed I would be afforded a good opportunity to learn something about type and image. Indeed, in my short tenure there, I employed more display typefaces in a year and a half than I will in the rest of my lifetime. And, I abused type more than I ever dreamed possible. There, type was always condensed or stretched so the height would be greater in a small format. The problem was that the face itself became distorted, as if it was put on the inquisitionist rack, with the horizontals remaining “thick” and the verticals thinning out. Back then, when type was “spec’d” and sent out to a typesetter, there was a standing order at the type house to condense all type for our company 20 percent. Sometimes, we would cut the type and extend it by hand, which created less distortion but still odd-looking faces. Once, I was instructed by the art director to cut the serifs off a face, to suit his whim. It’s a good thing there is no criminal prosecution for type abuse. The art director usually commissioned the art for these titles.Therefore, the job of the designers was to find the “appropriate” type solution that worked with these illustrations to create the package. It was here that I learned my earliest lessons in the clichés of typography. Massmarket paperbacks are divided into different genres, distinct categories that define their audience and subject matter. Though they were unspoken rules, handed down from generation to generation, here is what I learned about type during my employ.

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My solution, therefore, was to create images that contained the type as an integral part of the image, in a play on vernacular design, thereby avoiding the issue entirely. Thus began a series of collaborations with talented illustrators and photographers, in which the typography of the jacket was incorporated as part of the illustration.

Mystery books especially lent themselves well to this endeavor. A nice thing about this approach is that it has a certain informality and familiarity with the audience. It also made my job easier, because I did not have to paste up much type for the cover (as one had to do back in the days of t-squares and wax), since it was, for the most part, self-contained within the illustration.This may seem like laziness on my part, but hey, I was busy. Eventually, my eye began to develop, and my awareness and appreciation of good typography increased. I soon learned the pitfalls that most novice designers fall into, like utilizing a quirky novelty face does not equal creativity and usually calls attention to the wrong aspects of the solution. The importance of good letterspacing became paramount. Finding the right combination of a serif and sans serif face to evoke the mood of the material within was now my primary concern. The beauty of a classically rendered letterform now moved me, to quote Eric Gill, as much â&#x20AC;&#x153;as any sculpture or painted picture.â&#x20AC;? I deve oped an appreciation for the rules of typography. The Rules Design the rules in an engaging way. This is the most important part of the article. Make sure each stands out on the page so that readers can quickly glance at them. Take a look at infographics to get ideas for interesting layouts. As Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve said, it is a common mistake among young designers to think a quirky novelty face equals

T Y P E S O U R C E I A P R I L 2 0 1 5 I T YS O. C O M 6

Typefaces

Do not use text type as display. Even though the computer will enlarge the top beyond the type designer’s intention, this may result in distortions. Do not use display type as text. Often, display type that looks great large can be difficult to read when small. Do not stack type. The result is odd-looking spacing that looks as if it is about to tumble on top of itself. The thinness of the letter I is no match for the heft of an O sitting on top of it. As always, there are ways to achieve stacking successfully, but this requires care. Also, as I noted, much care should be given to letterspacing the characters of each word. This is not as simple as it seems. The computer settings for type are rife with inconsistencies that need to be corrected optically. Certain combinations of letterforms are more difficult to adjust than others. It is paramount that even optical (as opposed to actual) spacing is achieved, regardless of the openness or closeness of the kerning. It helps if you view the setting upside down, or backwards on a light box or sun-filled window, or squint at the copy to achieve satisfactory spacing. Be careful with drop shadows. I would caution you in the judicious use of drop shadows. Shadows these days can be rendered easily in programs such as Adobe’s Photoshop and Illustrator, and convincingly, too. The problem is, it is so easily done that it is overdone. Thus, the wholesale usage of soft drop shadows has become the typographic equivalent of clip art. Viewers know they have seen it before. Rather than being evocative, it mainly evokes the program it was created in. The handed-down wisdom is: If you need a drop shadow to make it read, the piece isn’t working. These solid drop shadows always look artificial, since, in reality, there is no such thing as a solid drop shadow. There should be a better solution to readability. Perhaps the background or the color of the type can be adjusted. Perhaps the type should be paneled or outlined. There are an infinite number of possible variations. If you must use a solid drop shadow, it should never be a color. Have you ever seen a shadow in life that is blue, yellow, or green? It should certainly never be white. Why would a shadow be 100 percent lighter than what is, in theory, casting the shadow? White shadows create a hole in the background, and draw the eye to the shadow, and not where you want it to go: the text. Justified text looks more formal than flush left, rag right. Most books are set justified, while magazines are often flush left, rag right. Centered copy will appear more relaxed than asymmetrical copy. Large blocks of centered type can create odd-looking shapes that detract from the copy contained within.

Steven Brower is an award-winning former Creative Director for PRINT, a former art director at the New York Times and currently for The Nation, co-author and designer of Woody Guthrie Artworks (Rizzoli, 2005), and author and designer of Satchmo: The Wonderful Art and World of Louis Armstrong (Abrams, 2009). In addition his writings on design and pop culture have appeared in several publications. He is the director of the â&#x20AC;&#x153;Get Your Masters with the Mastersâ&#x20AC;? MFA program for working professionals and educators at Marywood University in Scranton, PA.

You should never condensed or extend type.

About Steven Brower

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MORE TYPEFACES

Grooming The Font By Robert Bringhurst Writing begins with the making of meaningful marks.That is to say, leaving the traces of meaningful gestures. Typography begins with arranging meaningful marks that are already made. In that respect, the practice of typography is like playing the piano â&#x20AC;&#x201C; an instrument quite different from the human voice. On the piano, the notes are already fixed, although their order, duration and amplitude are not. The notes are fixed but they can be endlessly rearranged, into meaningful music or meaningless noise. Pianos, however, need to be tuned. The same is true of fonts. To put this in more literary terms, fonts need to be edited just as carefully as texts do â&#x20AC;&#x201C; and may need to be re-edited, like texts, when their circumstances change. The editing of fonts, like the editing of texts, begins before their birth and never ends. You may prefer to entrust the editing of your fonts, like the tuning

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Robert Bringhurst “Typography is to literature as musical performance is to composition: an essential act of interpretation, full of endless opportunities for insight or obtuness.” Bringhurst’s book The Elements of Typographic Style (1992) is considered one of the most influential reference books on typography and book design. The work has been translated into ten languages, and is now in its third edition.

Ethical and Aesthetic Considerations If it ain’t broke

Any part of the font can be tuned – lettershapes, character set, character encoding, fitting and sidebearings, kerning table, hinting, and, in an OpenType font, the rules governing character sub-situation. What doesn’t need tuning or fixing shouldn’t be touched. If you want to revise the font just for the sake of revising it, you might do better to design your own instead. And if you hack up someone else’s font for practice, like a biology student cutting up a frog, you might cremate or bury the results.

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If the font is out of tune, fix it once and for all: One way to refine the typography of a text is to work your way through it like by line, putting space in here, removing it there, and repositioning errant characters one by one. But if these refinements are made to the font itself, you will never need to make them again. They are done for good. Respect the text first of all, the letterforms second, the type designer third, the foundry fourth: The needs of the text should take precedence over the layout of the font, the integrity of the letterforms over the ego of the designer, the artistic sensibility of the designer over the foundry’s desire for profit, and the founder’s craft over a good deal else.

If there are defective glyphs, mend them: If the basic lettershapes of your font are poorly drawn, it is probably better to abandon it rather than edit it. But many fonts combine superb basic letterforms with alien or sloppy supplementary characters. Where this is the case, you can usually rest assured that the basic letterforms are the work of a real designer, whose craftsmanship merits respect, and that the supplementary characters were added by an inattentive foundry employee. The latter’s errors should be remedied at once. You may find for example that analphabetic characters such as @ + ± × =  - − © are too big or too small, too light or too dark, too high, or too low, or are otherwise out of tune with the basic alphabet.

Legal Considerations A font license grants the owner the right to use a typeface in a specific manner as outlined in the license. (Note that in this article we are going to use the terms “font” and “typeface” rather interchangeably.) Every typeface comes with a license of some sort – even those free online typefaces. The big caveat about font licenses is that every type house or designer has the right to create a license of any type. So it is imperative that as a designer you check the specific license for any typeface you use commercially before you use it. You can find these rules in the End-User License Agreement that is “attached” to every font you download or buy. (And if you don’t have one, you can find it with a quick online search.) Digital fonts are usually licensed to the user, not sold outright, and the license terms may vary. Some manufacturers claim to believe that improving a font produced by them is an infringement of their rights. No one believes that tuning a piano or pumping up the tires of a car infringes on the rights of the manufacturer – and this is true no matter whether the car or the piano has been rented, leased or purchased. Printing type was treated the same way from Bi Sheng’s time until the 1980s. Generally speaking, metal type and phototype are treated that way still. In the digital realm, where the font is wholly intangible, those older notions of ownership are under pressure to change. The Linotype Library’s standard font license says that “You may modify the Font’ Software to satisfy your design requirements.” FontShop’s standard license has a similar provision: “You do have the right to modify and alter Font Software for your customary personal and business use, but not for resale or further distribution.” Adobe’s and Agfa Monotype’s licenses contain no such provision. Monotype’s says instead that “You my not alter Font Software for the purpose of adding any functionality.... You agree not to adapt, modify, alter, translate, convert, or otherwise change the Font Software….” If your license forbids improving the font itself, the only legal way to tune it is through a software override. For example, you can use an external kerning editor to override the kerning table built into the font. This is the least elegant way to do it, but a multitude of errors in fitting and kerning can be masked, if need be, by this means.

If, like a good Renaissance typographer, you use only upright parentheses and bracketscopy the upright forms from the roman to the italic font. Only then can they be kerned and spaced correctly without fuss.

TypeCube Exploration Type Forms By Carolina Rivera

This is a typographic solutions to illustrate a scientific theory. In this case, it is going to be â&#x20AC;&#x153;Microgravity for children.. The final layout will be an exhibit displayed at Smithsonia National Museum Of American History in Washington. DC This project is an exploration in how type forms intersect when projected along the x, y, and z axis in 3D space. The intersections of those projections functions as part of a totality; the six contiguous sides are graphically and communicatively integrated. The design process will be developed through reading, research, rough designs, mock-ups, and final presentations of the cube. All sides are graphically and communicatively integrated, all sides of the structures are connected. That is, the page structure and text flow on all sides. By Ca

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Typefaces used: CASLON, it is designed by William Caslon (1692)(1766) Clasification : Old style Foundry : Caslon Type Foundry Variations: Adobe Caslon, Caslon 224. Caslon 224 was designed by Ed Benguiat of ITC, and release in 1983. http://carolinariverabotero.blogspot.com

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HOW Can Spacecraft Fall Around Earth? By Carolina Rivera

Back to Basics Stopping Sloppy Typography John D. Berry

The quotation marks around the sentence are real quotation marks, which blend in with the style of the lettering—“typographers’ quotes,” as they’re sometimes called— but the apostrophe at the end of “lookin’” is, disconcertingly, a single “typewriter quote,” a straight up-and-down line with a rounded top and a teardrop tail at the bottom.up-and-down line with a rounded top and a teardrop tail at the bottostraight up-and-down line with a rounded top and a teardrop tail at the bottom. There’s a billboard along the freeway in San Francisco that’s entirely typographic, and very simple. Against a bright blue background, white letters spell out a single short line, set in quotation marks: “Are you lookin’ at me?” The style of the letters is traditional, with serifs; it looks like a line of dialogue, which is exactly what it’s supposed to look like. Since this is a billboard, and the text is the entire message of the billboard, it’s a witty comment on the fact that you are looking at “me”hat is, the message on the billboard as you drive past. But, as my partner and I drove past and spotted this billboard for the first time, we both simultaneously voiced the same response: “No, I’m looking at your apostrophe!” To anyone with any sensitivity to the shapes of letters, whether they know the terms of typesetting or not, this straight apostrophe is like a fart in a symphony boorish, crude, out of place, and distracting. The normal quotation marks at the beginning and end of the sentence just serve to make the loud “blat!” of the apostrophe stand out. If that had been the purpose of the billboard, it would have been very effective. But unless the billboards along Highway 101 have become the scene of an exercise in typographic irony, it’s just a big ol’ mistake. Really big, and right out there in plain sight.

Th The Devil Is in the Details This may be a particularly large-scale example, but it’s not unusual. Too much of the signage and printed matter that we read—and that we, if we’re designers or typographers, create is riddled with mistakes like this. It seems that an amazing number of people responsible for creating graphic matter are incapable of noticing when they get the type wrong. This should not be so. These fine points ought to be covered in every basic class in typography, and basic typography ought to be part of the education of every graphic designer. But clearly, this isn’t the case or else a lot of designers skipped that part of the class, or have simply for- gotten what they once learned about type. Or, they naively believe the software they use will do the job for them. Maybe it’s time for a nationwide no, worldwide program of remedial courses in using type.

Automated Errors As my own small gesture toward improvement, I’ll point out a couple of the more obvious problems in the hope that maybe, maybe, they’ll become slightly less commonplace, at least for awhile. Typewriter quotes and straight apostrophes are actually on the wane, thanks to word-processing programs and page-layout programs that offer the option of automatically changing them to typographers’ quotes on the fly. (I’m not sure what has made the phenomenon I spotted on that billboard so common, but I’ve noticed a lot of examples recently of text where the double quotation marks are correct but the apostrophes are straight.) But those same automatic typesetting routines have created another almost universal mistake: where an apostrophe at the beginning of a word appears backwards, as a single open quotation mark. You see this in abbreviated dates (‘99,‘01) and in colloquial spellings, like ‘em for them. The program can turn straight quotes into typographers’ quotes automatically, making any quotation mark at the start of a word into an open quote, and any quotation mark at the end of a word into a closed quote, but it has no way of telling that the apostrophe at the beginning of ‘em isn’t supposed to be a single open quote, so it changes it into one. ere’s a billboard along the freeway in San Francisco that’s entirely typographic, and very simple. Against a bright blue background, white letters spell out a single short line, set in quotation marks:“Are you lookin’ at me?” The style of the letters is traditional, with serifs; it looks like a line of dialogue, which is exactly what it’s supposed to look like. Since this is a billboard, and the text is the entire message of the billboard, it’s a witty comment on the fact that you are looking at “me” that is, the message on the billboard as you drive past. But, as my partner and I drove past and spotted this billboard for the first time, we both simultaneously voiced the same response:“No, I’m looking at your apostrophe!” To anyone with any sensitivity to the shapes of letters, whether they know the terms of typesetting or not, this straight apostrophe is like a fart in a symphony boorish, crude, out of place, and distracting. The normal quotation marks at the beginning and end of the sentence just serve to make the loud “blat!” of the apostrophe stand out. If that had been the purpose of the billboard, it would have been very effective. But unless the billboards along Highway 101 have become the scene of an exercise in typographic irony, it’s just a big ol’ mistake. Really big, and right out there in plain sight.

Pay Attention,Now There are plenty of other bits of remedial typesetting that we ought to study, but those will do for now. The obvious corollary to all this is, to pro- duce well-typeset words, whether in a single phrase on a billboard or several pages of text, you have to pay attention. Proofread. Proofread again. Don’t trust the defaults of any program you use. Look at good typesetting and figure out how it was done, then do it yourself. Don’t be sloppy. Aim for the best.

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“Are you Lookin’ at me?”

The only way to catch this is to make the correcetion by hand

Automated Errors

Typewriter quotes and straight apostrophes are actually on the wane, thanks to word-processing programs and page-layout programs that offer the option of automatically changing them to typographers’ quotes on the fly. (I’m not sure what has made the phenomenon I spotted on that billboard so common, but I’ve noticed a lot of examples recently of text where the double quotation marks are correct but the apostrophes are straight.) But those same automatic typesetting routines have created another almost universal mistake: where an apostrophe at the beginning of a word appears backwards, as a single open quotation mark. You see this in abbreviated dates (‘99, ‘01) and in colloquial spellings, like ‘em for them. The program can turn straight quotes into typographers’ quotes automatically, making any quotation mark at the start of a word into an open quote, and any quotation mark at the end of a word into a closed quote, but it has no way of telling that the apostrophe at the beginning of ‘em isn’t supposed to be a single open quote, so it changes it into one.

How Good is Good? by Stefan Sagmeister

I do know that bas design can harm our lives. From the problems this little piece of bad typography caudes in Florida to unnecessary junk mail and overproduced packaging, bad design makes the world a more difficult place to live in

Stefan Sagmeister talks about the state of current design, ethics, advertising and aesthetics. In September design felt impotent and frivolous. There is nothing inherent in our profession that forces us to support worthy causes, to promote good things, to avoid visual pollution. There might be such a responsibility in us as people. In August, when thinking about my reasons for being alive, for getting out of bed in the morning, I would have written the following down. 1. Strive for happiness  2. Don’t hurt anybody  3. Help, others achieve the same Now I would change that priority: 1. Help others  2. Don’t hurt anybody  3. Strive for happiness My studio was engaged in cool projects, things designers like to do, like designing a cover for David Byrne We had a good time designing them, and since the products and events these pieces promoted were fine, I don’t think we hurt anybody who bought them. One of the many things I learned in my year without clients, a year I had put aside for experiments only, was that I’d like a part of my studio to move from creating cool things to significant things. The 80s in graphic design were dominated by questions about the layout, by life style magazines, with Neville Brody’s Face seen as the big event. The 90s were dominated by questions about typography, readability, layering, with David Carson emerging as the dominant figure. With prominent figures like Peter Saville recently talking about the crisis of the unnecessary and lamenting about the fact that our contemporary culture is monthly, there might now finally be room for content, for questions about what we do and for whom we are doing it. The incredible impact the First Things First manifesto had on my profession would certainly point in that direction. The first sentence on page 1 of Victor Papanek’s “Design for the Real World” reads: “There are professions more harmful than industrial design, but only very few of them. And possibly only one profession is phonier: Advertising design. In persuading people to buy things they don’t need, with money they don’t have, in order to impress others that don’t care, it is probably the phoniest field in existence today.” I do know that bad design can harm our lives. From the problems this little piece of bad typography caused in Florida to unnecessary junk mail and overproduced packaging, bad design makes the world a more difficult place to live in.

Opinion

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Typography illustration

by Stefan Sagmeister

Taking Your Fonts to Market: Foundry or Reseller? by Stephen Coles

When people ask about selling their fonts, the conversation almost always begins with the ol’ bottom line:“I wanna make some bank! Who offers the best royalty rate?” But the question of commission or discount percentage should be only one of many: What else is in the contract? What services do they guarantee? Do I respect their brand? What kind of audience do they speak to? Is their library a good fit for my typeface design? Is signing with a retailer even the right thing to do? It’s also important to understand the difference between a foundry (AKA vendor or publisher) and a reseller (AKA distributor or retailer). Here’s a rundown of your options. 1. Signing with a Foundry A foundry can be considered a font manufacturer. Examples are Linotype, Monotype, P22, and FontFont. Foundry type can be distributed through multiple channels, such as their own web shop and the shops of their resellers. When you submit a typeface to a foundry for release it is usually an exclusive deal. They will maintain the right to sell the font according to their contract. Royalties range from 20%-50% but there is also an important distinction: most foundries pay a percentage of the wholesale price of the font. In this model, as the font goes further down the distribution chain, the designer is getting less of the retail price. Other foundries, like FontFont, give a percentage of the suggested retail price — no matter where or how the font is sold, the designer gets the same cut. Advantages ◊ No business knowledge required, the foundry will handle all customer support (big!), marketing, and reseller relationships ◊ Some foundries offer technical and design assistance to complete font production ◊ Foundries are an advocate for your work, monitoring piracy and misuse ◊ pend less time administrating, more time drawing type Disadvantages ◊ Very little control of where and how fonts are sold ◊ Receive a portion of each sale ◊ Questions to ask yourself about a foundry ◊ Is the library a good fit for my style of type? ◊ What production assistance do they offer? ◊ Where are the foundry’s fonts sold and how are they marketed? ◊ What is the length of the contract agreement? 2. Signing with a Reseller A reseller offers fonts from multiple foundries. The major type resellers are Fonts.com, FontShop, MyFonts, and Veer. Resellers sign a contract with a foundry/ publisher and offer the fonts in that foundry’s library. The foundry usually receives between 40–65% of the retail price of the font. Each reseller has a different customer base and produces different kinds and quantities of promotional materials. Examine them thoroughly and ask about their marketing strategies. Some independent foundries (like ShinnType and Mark Simonson) have found success in reaching a wide audience by offering their fonts through many different resellers. Others go for a more exclusive strategy (like Porchez Typofonderie at FontShop, Jukebox at Veer) benefiting from a boost in promotion that comes when a retailer can claim they are the exclusive reseller. Advantages ◊ Reach more customers and diverse markets ◊ Maintain some control of brand, pricing, and the ability to sign with multiple resellers Disadvantages ◊ Must be somewhat business savvy ◊ Receive a portion of each sale Questions to ask yourself about a reseller ◊ Who is their clientele? ◊ How is their customer service? ◊ What marketing materials and other tools do they use to draw customers? TYPESOURCE I APRIL 2015 I TYSO.COM 22

Business

When people ask about selling their fonts, the conversation almost always begins with the ol” bottom line: “I wanna make some bank! Who offers the best royalty rate?” by Stephen Coles

Typeface Review Velo Serif But Velo Serif is not charted for long novels anyway. The overexcited display styles prompt big splendid uses (the text styles may assist here and there): sparkling large words in the almost monoline* Thin Italic, cigarette packages in regular, and please, please, please, a tear-off calendar in the Black style that uses the lovely curvy alternate

By Henrietta Porrier

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In Short

Attack design doldrums with stylistic souplesse. Fashionable figures break away from the populist peloton. Comprehensive characters for culturally correct creations. Sturdy serifs nimbly negotiate any typographic terrain.

Velo Serif

Reviewed by Indra Kupferschmid on March 19, 2015 Designer Ben Kiel, Christian Schwartz, Mitja Miklav Foundry House Industries Classification Serif Slab Serif Featured in Typefaces of 2014 Elsewhere Velo in use

Velo Serif won my heart four seconds after hitting my inbox with seductive gifs and a big ‘ä’. No one was surprised. I have a super-soft spot for squarish serifs. I love Zapf Book, not Palatino, I collect Old Hamcherry, have researched Corvini, and stare at Antikva Margaret in awe. Velo Serif brings several of these loves together in one contemporary retro type family, but avoids becoming too gimmicky 1970s (e.g., by resisting the obvious temptation for ball terminals).

The first features that spring to your eye are the ridiculously large x-height and the wide superelliptic forms of the lowercase. They are capital without being majuscule. Where other display serifs go for delicacy and long extenders, Velo rides the opposite way. The bolder styles get so wide that they feel more at home in packaging and advertising than headlines.

Alongside the main act, the twelve display styles, there are four text styles available, which contrary to the classic display/textrelationship have a lower x-height and narrower shapes. This makes them less obtrusive in running text and easier to read (a generous x-height doesn’t improve legibility infinitely). However, the boxy shapes and large counters still make the glyphs rather uniform and monotonous, especially in the Regular Italic. The bold weight of the text styles with its higher stroke contrast is the most readable one to me.

Typography in ten minutes Summary of key rules 1.

2. 3. 4. 5.

6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21.

22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

The four most im¬por¬tant typographic choices you make in any document are point size, line spacing, line length, and font (passim), bcause those choices determine how thebody text looks. point size should be 10–12 points in printed documents, 15-25 pixels on the web. line spacing should be 120–145% of the point size. The average line length should be 45–90 characters (including spaces). The easiest and most visible improvment you can make to your typography is to use a professional font, like those found in font recommendations. Avoid goofy fonts, monospaced fonts, and system fonts, especially times new roman and Arial. Use curly quotation marks, not straight ones (see straight and curly quotes). Put only one space between sentences. Don’t use multiple word spaces or other white-space characters in a row. Never use underlining, unless it’s a hyperlink. Use centered text sparingly. Use bold or italic as little as possible. all caps are fine for less than one line of text. If you don’t have real small caps, don’t use them at all. Use 5–12% extra letterspacing with all caps and small caps. kerning should always be turned on. Use first-line indents that are one to four times the point size of the text, or use 4–10 points of space between paragraphs. But don’t use both. If you use justified text, also turn on hyphenation. Don’t confuse hyphens and dashes, and don’t use multiple hyphens as a dash. Use ampersands sparingly, unless included in a proper name. In a document longer than three pages, one exclamation point is plenty (see question marks and exclamation points). Use proper trademark and copyright symbolsnot alphabetic approximations. Put a nonbreaking space after para¬graph and section marks. Make ellipses using the proper character, not periods andspaces. Make sure apostrophes point downward. Make sure foot and inch marks are

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Stephen Coles on November 20, 2014 This is a bold claim, but i stand behind it: if you learn and follow these five typography rules, you will be a better typographer than 95% of professional writers and 70% of professional designers. (The rest of this book will raise you to the 99th percentile in both categories.) All it takes is ten minutesfive minutes to read these rules once, then five minutes to read them again. Ready? Go. This is a bold claim, but i stand be¬hind it: if you learn and fol¬low these five typography rules, you will be a better typographer than 95% of professional writers and 70% of professional designers. (The rest of this book will raise you to the 99th percentile in both categories.) All it takes is ten minutes—five minutes to read these rules once, then five minutes to read them again. Ready? Go. 1.

The typographic quality of your document is determined largely by how the body text looks. Why? Because there’s more body text than anything else. So start every project by making the body text look good, then worry about the rest.

In turn, the appearance of the body text is determined primarily by these four typographic choices: 2.

Point size is the size of the letters. In print, the most comfortable range for body text is 10–12 point. On the web, the range is 15–25 pixels. Not every font appears equally large at a given point size, so be prepared to adjust as necessary.

Line spacing is the vertical distance between lines. It should be 120–145% of the point size. In word processors, use the “Exact” line-spacing option to achieve this. The default single-line option is too tight; the 1½-line option is too loose. In CSS, use line-height.

Line length is the horizontal width of the text block. Line length should be an average of 45–90 characters per line (use your word-count func¬tion) or 2–3 lowercase alphabets, like so:

abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcd In a printed document, this usually means page margins larger than the traditional one inch. On a web page, it usually means not allowing the text to flow to the edges of the browser window. 5.

And finally, font choice. The fastest, easiest, and most visible improvement you can make to your typography is to ignore the fonts that came free with your computer (known as system fonts) and buy a professional font (like my fonts Equity and Concourse, or others found in font recommendations). A professional font gives you the benefit of a professional designer’s skills without having to hire one.

Practical Tips If thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s impossible, you can still make good typography with system fonts. But choose wisely. And never choose Times New Roman or Arial, as those fonts are favored only by the apathetic and sloppy. Not by typographers. Not by you.

Ancestry.com

Web Type Mike Butterick on April 16, 2015 If Leo Tolstoy were alive and working in San Fran¬cisco as a web developer, he might tell us that poorly designed websites are all alike; each well-designed website is welldesigned in its own way. And, having watched the web evolve over its first 20 years, I would agree. We’ve seen how typewriter habits have maintained a peculiar influence on the typography of today’s documents (e.g., research papers). These habits arose from the mechanical limitations of the typewriter. When the typewriter disappeared, so did the limitations. But the habits remained. Detached from their original justification, they’ve become pointless obstructions. Likewise, the webdesign habits of the mid’90s continue to influence today’s web.These habits also arose from the technological limitations of a previous era. The limitations are obsolete. But the habits are still with us. Five have been especially tenacious: 1. Tiny point sizes for body text. This practice was made necessary by small displays, which otherwise couldn’t fit much text. But today’s displays are large. 2. Huge point sizes for headings. These arose from the elephantine default styling of HTML heading tags in old browsers. But today’s CSS allows finer control. 3. Reliance on a small handful of system fonts, like Arial, Georgia, and Verdana.This arose from a lack of technology for downloadable fonts. But today, we have webfonts. 4. Page edges crammed with inscrutable wads of navigational links. These emerged on the early web because content was so sparse. Links gave readers something else to doclick and move. (Hence the idiom became surfing the web, not reading the web.) But today, getting content onto the web is relatively easy, and navigational confusion tends to be a greater risk than boredom. 5. Layouts built with large blocks of color. These were made necessary by the bandwidth limitations of the early web. (They also filled space on those contentdeprived web pages.) But today, high-speed connections are common, even on mobile devices. Yet not only are these habits still with us, they’ve hardened into entrenched webdesign idioms. Don’t take my word for it. Go to any major website with this checklist. You’ll count at least four. These habits are everywhere. But bad habits don’t become good habits through repetition. We know this to be true of spelling, grammar, and usage in American English. Sure, our language changes. But slowly. Not by popular vote. Certainly not by popular error. So it is with typography. Web design: neither here nor there And that’s the odd wrinkle we have to overcome when we talk about the web. Because to convince you to abandon the typewriter habits in printed documents, I’m able to cite a persuasive body of evidence: namely, the professional typographic practices of the last 500 years, as reflected in the books, newspapers, and magazines we read daily. The web, however, has no equivalent by holding the web to print illogical. But it’s equally illogical to benchmark on the grounds that it’s is primarily a typographic medium), it’s notthe web is 20 years old), or true of every technology, including

tradition. We can’t fill this gap merely traditions. That would be limiting and refuse to compare the web to any sui generis (because it’s notthe web or that it’s new technology (because that it’s still evolving (because that’s print).

Nevertheless, we’ve kept web design hovering in an odd state of neither here nor there. How? Like the poor worker of proverbby blaming the tools. If you ask a web designer “why aren’t we doing better with web typography?” you’re likely to hear either “we can’t, because suchandsuch won’t work in the old browsers” or “we can’t, until suchand-such works in the new browsers.” The culture of web design encourages us to rely on the past and the future as excuses for why we can’t take accountability for the present. These excuses keep today’s web design in a bubble, conveniently impervious to criticism. For more about web design inertia, see my talk “The Bomb in the Garden.” But impervious to criticism also means impervious to progress. When expectations are held artificially low, there’s no incentive to do better. Thus next year’s websites end up looking much like last year’s. And the inertia sustains itself indefinitely. Again, don’t take my word for it the ongoing ubiquity of obsolete web design habits is the proof. Therefore, my typographic advice for websites is more a principle than a prescription. We can disagree about what design excellence will eventually mean on the web. In fact, we should dis-agree, be¬cause that’s what stimulates experimentation and discovery. Doing it wrong is a prerequisite to doing it right. But with the web, we can’t have it both ways. We can’t accept the benefits of web technology without rais-ng the bar for ourselves. We can’t use the web for 20 years as a design medium yet exempt it from design criticism. We can’t blame the tools for our failure to

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