Vernacular Type Nick Rissmeyer 2016
Table of Contents 2-7.............................................................................................................................................................................................................Primary text 10-13.....................................................................................................................................................................................................Seconday Type 14-15..............................................................................................................................................................................................................Typeface 16-19............................................................................................................................................................................Headlines/Linespacing/Kerning 20-25..............................................................................................................................................................................................Non-designed Type 26-27......................................................................................................................................................................................................Fonts/Emotion 28-29..............................................................................................................................................................................................Formal Type/Forms 30-31.......................................................................................................................................................................................................Abstract Type
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Headllines and the structure of a page create the personality of printed material. Primary type is used to draw attention to itself, to stop the browser and to lead to a specific piece of seconday type. The secondary type’s purpose, in turn, is to lead to the text. The text is always the final desitination. Headline treatments fall into three categories: alignment and position, contrasting type styles,and the integration of type and imagery. Regardless of design treatment, a great headline is provocatively written and makes an immediate point.
PRIM ARY T Y P E
Have you ever been to Japan? A friend who went there recently reported that he had never felt so lost in his life. Why? Because he could not read anything: not road signs, not price tags, not instructions of any kind. It made him feel stupid, he said. It also made him realize how much we all depend on written communication. Picture yourself in a world without type. True, you could do without some of the ubiquitous advertising messages, but you wouldn’t even know what the packages on your breakfast table contained. Sure enough, there are pictures on them – grazing cows on a paper carton suggest that milk is inside, and cereal packaging has appetizing images to make you hungry. But pick up salt or pepper, and what do you look for? S and P.
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Try to find your way around without type and you’ll be as lost as most of us would be in Japan, where there is plenty of type to read, but only for those who have learned to read the right sort of characters”. Breakfast for some people wouldn’t be the same without the morning paper. And here it is again: inevitable type. Most people call it “print” and don’t pay too much attention to typographic subtleties. You’ve probably never compared the small text typefaces in different newspapers, but you do know that some newspapers are easier to read than others. It might be because they have larger type, better pictures, and lots of headings to guide you through the stories. Regardless, all these differences are conveyed by type. In fact, a newspaper gets its look, its personality, from the typefaces used and the way in which they are arranged on the page.We easily recognize our favorite newspapers on the newsstand, even if we see only the edge of a page, just as we recognize our friends by seeing only their hands or their hair. And just as people look different across the world, so do the newspapers in different countries. What looks totally unacceptable to a North American reader will please the French reader at breakfast, while an Italian might find a German daily paper too monotonous.Of course, it’s not only type or layout that distinguishes newspapers, it is also the combination of words. Some languages have lots of accents, like French; some have very long words, like Dutch or Finnish; and some use extremely short words, as in a British tabloid. Not every typeface is suited for every language, which also explains why certain type styles are popular in certain countries, but not necessarily anywhere else.
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What appears frightfully complex and incomprehensible to people who can read only the Latin alphabet brings news to the majority of the world’s population. Chinese and Arabic are spoken by more than half the people on this planet. Some of the accents, special signs, and characters seen in languages other than English, giving each of them its unique appearance.
This brings us back to type and newspapers. What might look quite obvious and normal to you when you read your daily paper is the result of careful planning and applied craft. Even newspapers with pages that look messy are laid out following complex grids and strict hierarchies. The artistry comes in offering the information in such a way that the reader doesn’t get sidetracked into thinking about the fact that someone had to carefully prepare every line, paragraph, and column into structured pages. Design – in this case, at least – has to be invisible. Typefaces used for these hardworking tasks are therefore, by definition “invisible”. They have to look so normal that you don’t even notice you’re reading them. And this is exactly why designing type is such an unknown profession; who thinks about people who produce invisible things? Nevertheless, every walk of life is defined by, expressed with, and indeed, dependent on type and typography.
USAToday, one of the leading news papers in the United States, is designed to a grid.
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Just as the newspaper on the opposite page is laid out according to an underlying structure of some intricacy, this book is designed within its own constraints. The page is divided into equal parts, each of which has the same proportion as the whole page, i.e., 2:3. The page is made up of 144 rectangles, each one measuring 12 by 18 millimeters, 12 rectangles across and 12 down. This makes the page 144 by 216 millimeters, or roughly 5 21⁄32 by 8 1⁄2 inches. The columns are multiples of the 12millimeter unit. Because there has to be some distance between columns, 3 mm (or more for wider columns) have to be subtracted from these multiples of 12 to arrive at the proper column width.
The distance between lines of type (still archaically referred to as leading – rhymes with heading) is measured in multiples of 1.5 mm. All typographic elements are positioned on this baseline grid of 1.5 mm, which is fine enough to be all but invisible to the reader, but which helps layout and produc tion. The discipline offered by this kind of fine grid gives the same sort of coherence to a page as bricks do to a building. They are small enough to allow for all styles of architecture, while serving as the common denominator for all other proportions.
More and more people read the news not on paper, but on TV screens or computer monitors. Type and layout have to be reconsidered for these applications.
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If the headline is the lure, the subhead is the readers’ payoff. Here is the opportunity to hook the reader by explaining the headline. The headline leads to one or more secondary messages, first a subhead or deck, but possibly a caption, breakout, or pull quote. The messages in the headline and subhead should be two parts of a complete though, provocatively showing why the story is important to the reader. Readers should, after a total of three or four information “hits,” have been given enough information about the story to make an informed decision about whether or not to get into the text. Actually becoming committed to the text can happen only after they have begun reading it. Subheads are secondary type that explain headlines. A deck is a subhead immediately beneath the headline. A floating subhead is secondary type placed away from the headline. A beaker head is placed in the text column and regularly hints at the worthwhile goodies within. Breakouts and pull quotes are brief extracts from the text that are handled like verbal illustrations. Provocatively edited, their purpose is to make browsers stop and consider reading the story. Breakouts and pull quotes can visually connect pages of a long story by repeating a vacation of the type treatment of the opener’s headline
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Captions are display type: they are read before the text and should provide information about the story. These captions are labels that tell us how to interpret the image.
SECONDARY TYPE
Captions explain photos. Because they are read before the text, they must be thought of as display type and be fascinating enough to persuade potential readers to enter the text.
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Subheads are secondary type that explain or support the headline. Sometimes, they can be tailgates at the end of text, as shown here. Secondary type exists hierarchically between the primary type and the tertiary type. Secondary type should be smaller - or less noticeable - than the headline, but more prominent than text. A balance must be struck between contrasts and unity among the three levels of type. Variations of one typeface in the primary and secondary type contrast well against a highly legible text face. Selecting the right typeface is a significant decision, but how you use a typeface is at least as important as what typeface is used. Imagine if your work were given an award for design excellence: would the typeface designer get the credit or would you be recognized for having used type well? A friend redesigned a magazine in the days of hot metal type (this was in the 1960’s), when font was truly a single typeface in one size and weight. The client had purchased only two fonts: twelve-point Franklin Gothic Regular and Bold. The
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magazine could only use those two fonts, yet had to do all that a magazine’s typography must express. The redesign, using only position and emptiness to make display type visible, succeeded because of the extremely limited typographic contrast. In general - and to make contrasts look intentional - use no more than two typeface families in a design, and don’t use more than two weights of each face. If you add italic versions of the regular weights you have six typographic “voices,” equivalent to hearing six people reading aloud, which should be enough to convey any message.
If you think that the choice of a typeface is something of little importance because nobody would know the difference anyway, you’ll be surprised to hear that experts spend an enormous amount of time and effort perfecting details that are invisible to the untrained eye.
It is a bit like having been to a concert, thoroughly enjoying it, then reading in the paper the next morning that the conductor had been incompetent, the orchestra out of tune, and the piece of music not worth performing in the first place. While you had a great night out, some experts were unhappy with the performance because their standards and expectations were diffe rent than yours. The same thing happens when you have a glass of wine. While you might be perfectly happy with whatever you’re drinking, someone at the table will make a face and go on at length about why this particular bottle is too warm, how that year was a lousy one anyway, and that he just happens to have a case full of some amazing stuff at home that the uncle of a friend imports directly from France. Does that make you a fool or does it simply say that there are varying levels of quality and satisfaction in everything we do? Food and design: how often do we buy the typographic promise without knowing much about the product? Stereo types abound – some colors suggest certain foods, particular typefaces suggest different flavors and quali ties.
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Without these unwritten rules we wouldn’t know what to buy or order. As they say in England: “Different strokes for different folks.” The kinds of food and drink known to mankind are almost limitless. No single person could be expected to know them all. One guide through this maze of taste and nourishment, of sustenance as well as gluttony, is offered by the labels on products – as long as they are packaged in containers that can carry information. Without typography we wouldn’t know which contains what or what should be used which way. Small wonder that type on food packages is often hand lettered, because standard typefaces don’t seem to be able to express this vast array of tastes and prom ises. These days, hand lettering sometimes means using software programs, such as Adobe Illustra tor, that combine design and art work at a level unimaginable only a few decades ago. Anything a graphic designer can think of can be produced in amazing quality.
Food and design: how often do we buy the typographic promise without knowing much about the product? Stereo types abound – some colors suggest certain foods, particular typefaces suggest different flavors and quali ties. Without these unwritten rules we wouldn’t know what to buy or order.
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Headlines are made of clusters of phrases and should be “broken for sense” into these clusters, regardless of the shape this forces on the headline (facing page, fourth row). To find the natural breaks, read a headline out loud. Try not to break a headline to follow a design; rather, break a headline so that it makes the most sense to the reader. Hyphenating type communicates that shape is more important than meaning. Display type should never be hyphenated, unless its meaning is to illustrate “disconnection” The effectiveness of display typography is principally dependent on the management of the white space between and around the letterforms, not only on the letterforms themselves. Because display type is brief (to snag the reader’s attention), letter spacing, word spacing, and line breaks become more important. Increase contrast and visibility of headlines by making them darker on the page. Reduce white space in and around characters in letter spacing and linespacing (facing page, bottom0. All-cap headlines in particular should have linespacing removed because there are no descenders to “fill in” the space between lines. In upper - and
lowercase settings, don’t let ascenders and descenders touch, or they’ll create an unintentional stigma on the page.
Digitally compressing or expanding type creates anomalies. visible distortion becomes apparent in most typefaces at about +/- 5 percent of normal set width. Small caps match the weight of full-size caps. False small caps, which are merely reduced in size, look too light because they are proportionally smaller. Kerning is the optical spacing of letterform pairs, which is far more important than global tracking at display sizes. Breaking for sense puts meaning above form and should be seriously considered in display headings. Linespacing should be tightened in headlines to make the chunk of type darker. Display type can have “poor� spacing attributes if it is the very thing that defines the type. Display type requires especially careful spacing. The best way to achieve optically consistent spacing is to treat each individual letter as a form: convert it to paths and adjust manually.
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Some of the most pervasive typographical messages have never really been designed, and neither have the typefaces they are set in. Some engineer, administrator, or accountant in some government department had to decide what the signs on our roads and freeways should look like. This person probably formed a committee made up of other engineers, administrators, and accountants who in turn went to a panel of experts that would have included manufacturers of signs, road safety experts, lobbyists from auto mobile associations plus more engi neers, administrators, and accountants. You can bet there wasn’t one typographer or graphic designer in the group, so the outcome shows no indi cation of any thought toward legibility, let alone commu nication or beauty. Nevertheless we’re stuck with our road signs. They dominate our open spaces, forming a large part of a country’s visual culture. Traditional type for signs used to be constructed from geometric patterns so that they could be recreated by signmakers everywhere. Type as data travels more easily, so there are no more excuses for not having real type on signs.
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Signage systems have to fulfill complex demands. Reversed type (e.g., white type on a blue background) looks heavier than positive type (e.g., black on yellow), and backlit signs have a different quality than frontlit ones. Whether you have to read a sign on the move (from a car, for example), or while standing still on a welllit platform, or in an emergency – all these situations require careful typo graphic treatment. In the past, these issues have been largely neglected, partly because it would have been almost impossible to implement and partly because designers chose to ignore these problems, leaving them up to other people who simply weren’t aware that special typefaces could help improve the situation. These have now been designed with a series of closelyrelated weights to offer just the right one, whether it’s for a backlit dark sign with white type, or for just black words on white, lit by the sun from above. The PostScriptTM data generated with these types in drawing and layout applications can be used to cut letters of any size from vinyl, metal, wood, or any other material used for signs. There are no more excuses for badly designed signs, whether on our roads or inside our buildings.
Engineers are still responsible for the signs on our roads and freeways. And they still think that Arial is the best typeface ever, simply because it is ubiquituous. But there are signs (!) of progress even in those circles: The new German diN (Deutsche Industrie Norm = German Industrial Standard) committee has finally acknowledged what a lot of designers have always known: Some characters are easily confused with each other. A figure 1 looking like a lowercase l and a capital I are major offenders. The new diN 1450 suggests a lowercase l with a loop, a capital I with serifs, and a figure 1 with a horizontal bottom stroke. Why not use serif faces in the first place, you may ask? Interesting question, and unfortunately one not even discussed among the engineers on the committee (although there was a real type designer present). They think that serif faces are oldfashioned and could not possibly be used for signage or any other contemporary purpose. Since this book was first published in 1993, quite a few type designers have turned their attention to this field, although neither fame nor fortune promise to be made.
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The US freeways now have Clearview, a typeface designed by James Montalbano, based on the existing Highway Gothic, but actually legible and friendly. Airports the world over have adopted Frutiger, the typeface originally designed for Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris in 1976. It has recently been updated with its signage version featuring that special l, the 1, and a dotted 0. Berlin Transit has had its spe cial version of Frutiger Condensed, called ff Transit, since 1992. Düsseldorf Airport has signs in ff Info. Ralf Herrmann designed a typeface called Wayfinding Sans. Vialog was developed by Werner Schneider and Helmut Ness for wayfinding projects, as was Arrival by Keith Chihang Tam. Several countries adopted the British Transport alphabet for their road signage. Unfortunately, somebody made the type much fatter: probably an engineer who thought that more weight is more legible. The opposite is true.
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Every PC user today knows what a font is, calls at least some of them by their first name (e.g. Helvetica,Verdana, and Times), and appreciates that typefaces convey different emotions. Although what we see on screen are actually little unconnected square dots that fool the naked eye into recognizing pleasant shapes, we now expect all type to look like “print”.
FON
TS
While there is a tendency to overdesign everything and push technology to do things it was never intended to do, like printing onto raw eggs, at least we can continue our typographic training even when deciding whether the food we bought is good for nourishing or not. When each egg has data stamped on it, I wonder how the type got there. Does each chicken have its own little rubber stamp? Or do all the eggs roll by a machine, which gently impresses onto that, most breakable of surfaces? And do different sorts of eggs have different types on them? Brush Script for freerange, (see page 187), Copperplate for the expensive gourmet ones from geese and Helvetica for battery eggs?
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I don’t know whether the makers of Brunello di Montalcino deliberately chose the tall type for the labels on their wine bottles, but the widely spaced figures and the robust caps possess a certain elegance. As Monotype shows with its Andale Mono (which comes free with Microsoft software), there is room for good design even within the constraints of monospaced system fonts. Bar codes and Ocr numbers are inseparable, but even that generic alphabet has already inspired a whole new type. And if you must imitate the printing on eggshells, ff Atlanta has the blotchy outlines needed to do so convincingly. While the makers of dot matrix printers try to emulate real logos, the designers of real fonts deliver the tools to print your restaurant receipts.
FORMS
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While it might be fun to look at wine labels, chocolate boxes, or candy bars in order to stimulate one’s appetite for food or fonts (depending on your preference), most of us definitely do not enjoy an equally prevalent form of printed communication: forms. If you think about it, you’ll have to admit that business forms process a lot of information that would be terribly boring to have to write fresh every time. All you do is check a box, sign your name, and you get what you ask for. Unless, of course, you’re filling out your tax return, when they get what they ask for; or unless the form is so poorly written, designed, or printed (or all of the above) that you have a hard time understanding it. Given the typographic choices available, there is no excuse for producing bad business forms, illegible invoices, awkward applications, one’s ridiculous receipts, or bewildering ballots. Not a day goes by without one’s having to cope with printed matter of this nature. It could so easily be a more pleasant experience. While onscreen forms offer a very reduced palette of typographic
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choices, they at least provide some automatic features to help with the drudgeryoftypingyourcreditcardnumber. While onscreen forms offer a very reduced palette of typographic choices, they at least provide some automatic features to help with the drudgeryoftypingyourcreditcardnumber. The “generic” look of most business forms usually derives from technical constraints. But even when those restrictions no longer exist, the look lingers on, often confirming our pre judice against this sort of standardized communication. Typefaces used for business communications have often been designed for a particular technology – optical character recognition, needle printers, monospaced typewriters, and other equipment. What was once a technical constraint can today become a trend. The “nondesigned” look of Ocr B, the good old honest typewriter faces, even the needle printer, and other lowresolution
alphabets have all been exploited by designers to evoke certain effects. If you want to avoid any discussion about the typefaces you’re using in your letters or invoices, you can fall back onto Courier, Letter Gothic, or other monospaced fonts (see page 175), even though they are less legible and take up more space than “proper” typefaces. You could be slightly more courageous and try one of those new designs that were created specifically to address both the question of legibility and space economy, and reader expectations.
There are places where playfulness with legibility is inappropriate. Text, for example. is simply too small to absorb abstraction without substantially losing legibility. But display type is tailor-made for unusual treatments that flirt with illegibility. Display type is meant to attract attention and it is usually big, so letterforms can be read even if they are “damaged.” There are an infinite number of ways to “harm” letter and word forms, and they are all combinations of the nine typographic contrasts. Type abstraction simply pushes a normal contrast to an extreme. For example, making type “big” isn’t enough. Making type so big that the edges are indistinct works because it forces and interaction of figure/ground. Damaged letterforms suit some messages perfectly. Space between letters can be used to enhance identity. Typographic expression and playfulness is best done with relatively plain typefaces. Simple letterforms are editable while keeping their recognizable shapes. Some typefaces are inherently abstract and hard to read. With these, ordinary typesetting is all that’s needed to create an attention-getting abstracted message.
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A typeface’s character may be corroborative, contradictory, or neutral to the meaning of its message. Use typography that is laden with character sparingly, only in the primary and secondary type which its attention-getting strength is at least as important as its legibility.
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