Ellipsis Magazine by Rebecca Woods

December 2014 IS SUE #1

Grooming the Font Reshaping Type Design

Type Casting A Paperback History

Influential Type Changing the World

Back to Basics Stopping Sloppy Type

5 December 2014 IS SUE #1

Grooming the Font Reshaping Type Design

Type Casting A Paperback History

Influential Type Changing the World

Back to Basics Stopping Sloppy Type

Letter from the Publisher

Greetings, Readers In a growing world of information, typography is more important than ever; it connects us, informs us, directs us and inspires us. The articles in this magazine address this awareness of typography’s role in our world, from the rules that determine it, to the people and situations we can impact with it. Our writers focus on the importance of presenting clean, well-designed information and they break this down into key elements and steps to better help other designers. The writer of our final article describes using a typographic display in the real world in a Stefan Sagmeister style way, bringing awareness to typography in a way that people can personally and physically engage in. The writers of this issue’s columns, such notable design figureheads such as Michael Beirut, Jessica Hische, Stefan Sagmeister, and Erik Spiekermann, explore that same concept of the importance of typography at its most basic level: creation. From the use of hand materials in our "Back to Brass Tacks" section, to concept design in “The Drawing Board,” to the scientific side of creating a typeface in our “In the Lab” column, these experts explain what excellent typography is and how we can achieve it from its beginning stages. We would like to thank our readers, and we can only hope that these articles and pieces connect, inform, direct, and inspire you in your work and in your life, because together as designers we can positively change the world.

Back to Brass Tacks Hand-Drawn Approaches to Modern Design

Q: As a designer, what are the advantages of creating with your hands over digital?

A: Since a lot of the work that I do is related to food, it is very important that the design communicates appetite appeal. A hand-crafted approach will give the design a tactile quality and an authenticity that will make someone want to take the product home.

Q: Your work takes traditional elements and reworks them into something fresh and new without losing the ‘soul’ of the original. Is it difficult to achieve? A: Yes! It is not simply a matter of appropri-

ating the material, but rather an interpretation of a style that has been put into a modern context. I often wonder who designed the beautiful pasticceria papers that I have in my collection, and what he or she would be designing today.

Q: How did your love affair with Italian typography and signage begin?

A: I was sixteen years old when I travelled

with my family for the first time to Italy. As I recall, immediately upon arriving in Milan, in the haze of jet lag and the oppressive July heat, I was struck by a billboard featuring an art nouveau rendering of a couple in a passionate embrace against an inky night sky, with just the words Baci and Perugina. I didn’t know what product this advertised, but it didn’t matter. The woman was clearly in a swoon, and so was I. This was the pivotal moment when I fell in love all at once with Italy, type, and food. Whenever I see the iconic Baci package (though it has been ruthlessly updated over the years), it still makes me smile.

- Louise Fili

Graphic & Identity Designer

Ellipsis - Back to Brass Tacks -

ht tp://stevenbrowerdesign.com/f lash.html

Steven

B ro w e r

Creative Director for Print Magazine

Below: Vegetable and fruit recreations of Penguin Classics

y first job in book design was at new american library, a

publisher of mass-market books. i was thrilled to be hired. it

was exactly where I wanted to be. I love the written word, and viewed this as my entrance into a world I wanted to participate in. Little did I suspect at the time that mass-market books, also known as “pocket” books (they measure approximately 4”x7”, although I have yet to wear a pocket they fit comfortably into), were viewed in the dies world as the tawdry stepchild of true literature and design, gaudy and unsophisticated. I came to understand that this was due to the fact that mass-market books, sold extensively in supermarkets and convenience stores, had more in common with soap detergent and cereal boxes than with their much more dignified older brother, the hardcover first edition book. Indeed, the level of design of paperbacks was as slow to evolve as a box of Cheerios. On the other hand, hardcover books, as if dressed in evening attire, wore elegant and sophisticated jackets. Next in line in terms of standing, in both the literary and design worlds, was

a misnomer that does not refer to a specific audience within an area of work, but, rather, to the second edition of the hardcover, or first edition, that sports a paperbound cover. Trade paperbacks usually utilize the same interior printing as the hardcover, and are roughly the same size (generally, 6” x 9”). Mass-market books were not so lucky. The interior pages of the original edition were shrunk own, with no regard for the final type size or the eyes of the viewer. The interiors tended to be printed on cheap paper stock, prone to yellowing over time. The edges were often dyed to mask the different grades of paper used. The covers were usually quite loud, treated with a myriad of special effects (i.e., gold or silver foil, embossing and de-bossing, spot lamination, die cuts, metallic and Day-Glo pantone colors, thermography, and even holography), all designed to jump out at you and into your shopping cart as you walk down the aisle. The tradition of mass-market covers had more in common with, and, perhaps, for the most part is the descendant of, pulp magazine covers of earlier decades, with their colorful titles and over-the-top illustrations, than that of its more stylish, larger, and more expensive cousins. Ellipsis - Type Casting -

“I abused type more than I ever dreamed possible.”

What I Learned So, when I made my entry into the elite world of literature, I began in the “bullpen” of a mass-market 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 tittles. Therefore, the job of the designers was to find the “appropriate” type solutions that worked with these illustrations to create the package. It was here that I learned my earliest lessons in the cliches of typography. Mass-market 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:

8 -

Type Casting - ELLIPSIS

And so it went. Every month, we were given five to six titles we were responsible for, and every month, new variations on old themes hung up on the wall. For a brief period I was assigned all the romance titles, which, themselves, were divided into subgenres (historical, regency, contemporary, etc). I made the conscious decision to create the very best romance covers around. Sure, I would use script and cursive type, but I would use better script and cursive type, so distinctive, elegant, and beautiful that I, or anyone else, would recognize the difference immediately. (When, six months after I left the job, I went to view my achievements at the local K-Mart, I could not pick out any of my designs from all the rest on the bookracks.)

Top Left: Book Script Writing Top Right: Library full of Penguin Books

The Rules Soon after, I graduated to art director of a small publishing house. The problem was, I still knew little of and had little confidence in, typography. However, by this time, I knew I knew little about typography. 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 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 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 notice 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 becomes 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 beautify o the classically rendered letterform now moved me, to quote Eric Gill, as much “as any sculpture or painted picture.” I developed an appreciation for the rules of typography.

As I’ve said, it is a common mistake among young designers to think a quirky novelty face equals creativity. Of course, this couldn’t be farther from the truth. If anything, for the viewer, it has the opposite of the intended effect. Rather than being the total sum of individual expression, it simply calls attention to itself, detracting from, rather than adding to, the content of the piece. It is no substitute for a well-reasoned conceptual solution to the design problem at hand. As a general rule, no more than two faces should be utilized in any given design, usually the combination of a serif face and a sans serif face. There are thousands to choose from, but I find I have reduced the list to five or six in each category that I have used as body text throughout my career:

You should never condense or extend type. As i stated, this leads to unwanted distortions. Much care and consideration went into the design of these faces, and they should be treated with respect. There are thousands of condensed faces to choose from without resorting to the horizontal and vertical scale functions. 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

“You should never condense or extend type.”

Ellipsis - Type Casting -

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. 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. Hard drop shadows, ones that are 100 percent of a color, are easily achieved in Quark and placed behind the main text. This method is generally employed when the main text is not reading against the background, because of a neutral tone or an image that varies in tone from dark to light. 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 outline. 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

10 -

Type Casting - ELLIPSIS

shapes that detract from the copy contained within. Another thing to consider is the point size and width of body copy. The tendency in recent times is to make type smaller and smaller, regardless of the intended audience. However, the whole purpose of text is that it be read. A magazine covering contemporary music is different from the magazine for The American Association of Retired Persons. It is also common today to see very wide columns of text, with the copy set at a small point size. The problem is that a very wide column is hard to read because it forces the eye to move back and forth, tiring the reader. On the other hand, a very narrow measure also is objectionable, because the phrases and words are too cut up, with the eye jumping from line to line. We, as readers, do not read letter by letter, or even word by word, but, rather, phrase by phrase. A consensus favors an average of ten to twelve words per line. Lastly, too much leading between lines also makes the reader work too hard jumping from line to line, while too little leading makes it hard for the reader to discern where one lie ends nother begins. The audience should always be paramount in the designer’s approach, and it is the audience—not the whim of the designer, or even the client—that defines the level of difficulty and ease with which a piece is read. As Eric Gill said in 1931, “A book is primarily a thing to be read.” A final consideration is the size of the type. As a rule of thumb, mass-market books tend to be 8 point for reasons of space. A clothbound book, magazine, or newspaper usually falls into the 9.5 to 12 point range. Oversized art books employ larger sizes—generally, 14 point to 18 point or more. Choosing the right typeface for your design can be time-consuming. There are thousands to choose from. Questions abound. Is the face legible at the setting I want? Does it evoke what I want it to evoke? Is it appropriate to the subject matter? There are no easy answers. When a student of mine used Clarendon in a self-promotion piece, I questioned why he chose a face that has 1950s connotations, mainly in connection with the Reid Miles’ Blue Note album covers. He answered, “Because I thought it was cool.” I lectured him profusely on selecting type simply based on its “coolness.” Later, I relayed the incident to Seymour Chwast, of the legendary Pushpin Group (formerly Pushpin Studios). He observed that Clarendon

Left: Stacked Penguin Classics Right: Artistic & typographic re-do of a paperback Jane Eyre

is actually a Victorian face, which he and his peers revived as young designers in the 1950s. When I asked him why they chose to bring this arcane face back to life, he replied “Because we thought it was cool.”

Breaking the Rules Of course, there are always exceptions to the rules. An infinite number of faces can be used within one design, particularly when you employ a broadside-style type solution, a style that developed with the wood type settings of the nineteenth century. Another style, utilizing a myriad of faces, is that influenced by the Futurist and Dada movements of the early twentieth century. As Robert N. Jones stated in an article in the May 1960 issue of Print magazine: “It is my belief that there has never been a typeface that is so badly designed that it could not be handsomely and effectively used in the hands of the right … designer.” Of course, this was before the novelty type explosion that took place later that decade, and, again, after the advent of the Macintosh computer. Still, Jeffery Keedy, a contemporary type designer whose work appears regularly in Emigre, concurs: “good designers can make use of almost anything. The typeface is the point of departure, not the destination.” Note the caveat “almost.” Stil, bad use of good type is much less desirable than good use of bad type. When I first began in publishing, a coworker decided to let me in on the “secrets” of picking the appropriate face. “If you get a book on Lincoln to design,” he advised,” look up an appropriate typeface in the index of the type specimen book.” He proceeded to do so. “Ah, here we go—‘Log Cabin!’” While, on the extremely rare occasion, I have found this to be a useful method, it’s a good general rule of what not to do. ~*~

Ellipsis - Type Casting -

Style & Form I

The Aesthetic Choices Behind Typography’s Greats

am a letterer who enjoys craftsmanship, and both the form of the letterforms and the medium are equally important to me. Even when we produce something that is made out of something, the form is not totally driven by that one medium. I’ll give an example. When we did the world limits swimming around in the swimming pool, we sketched that out before, because I didn’t want this air conditioning, tubing material, that we made it out from, solely to dictate the form of that work. I do know that bad form and bad design can harm our lives. From the problems a 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. At the same time, though, strong design for bad causes or products can hurt us even more. Context is what’s all important. Bad design for a good cause can still be a good thing. We designed the logo for The Concert for New York, a huge charity event for the fire and policeman in Madison Square Garden, involving among others Paul McCartney, Mick Jagger, The Who. From a design point of view, the statue of liberty playing a guitar is a trite cliché. I am not suggesting that the logo had much to do with the over $ 20 million raised for the Robin Hood Foundation, well, actually, a tiny portion was raised through the logo in the from of merchandize sales.

- Stefan Sagmeister Graphic Designer & Lettering Artist

12 -

Style & Form - ELLIPSIS

The Drawing Board The Humble Beginnings of Our Greatest Typefaces

I think it’s important to consider lettering

and typography early in a project, but not necessarily make ALL of your decisions about it as the first step (meaning don’t solidly declare you MUST use a certain typeface before you’ve addressed the rest of the design). I work very additively in almost everything I do, making general decisions and then shaping and whittling away until the design feels “right”. When I approach a new project, I first think about the general feeling that I want the piece to have—where it should fall on the “vintage” to “modern” scale; the masculine to feminine scale; the minimalist to highly ornate scale. Thinking about a project as being “a moderately vintage, feminine but not overly ornate” is a much less intimidating starting point, and having a general mood goal helps put clients at ease. It’s my tendency to jump to the lettering and type next, but it really varies project to project….. I definitely try to diversify my knowledge and skill set beyond lettering—I think it’s impossible to be a well rounded designer if you’re not at least reading up on related industries. I spent six months of this year attending a continuing-ed. program for typeface design thinking that because the type industry is adjacent to lettering it was a natural next step in my career. After getting my feet wet, I realized that I am just not built to be a proper typeface designer—it requires an inordinate amount of patience and a love of long-term projects, neither of which come naturally to me. I’m very patient in short bursts but if a project lasts more than a few intense weeks I get antsy to move on to something new. I learned an incredible amount about the type industry and typeface design in that short amount of time, so it of course wasn’t all for naught.

- Jessica Hische Professional Letterer & Type Designer Ellipsis - The Drawing Board -

Below: Spray painted grammatic apostraphe graphic

here’s a billboard along the freeway in

cisco that’s entirely typographic, and

San Franvery 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!” 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. 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 thebillboard, 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.

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

President of ATypI

But clearly, this isn’t the case—or else a lot of designers skipped that part of the class, or have simply forgotten 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. The only way to catch this is to make the correction by hand—every time.

Anemic Type The other rude noise that has become common in the symphony hall is fake small caps. Small caps are a wonderful thing, very useful and some-times elegant; fake small caps are a distraction and an abomination. Fake caps are what you get when you use a program’s “small caps” command. The software just shrinks the full-size capital letters down by a predetermined percentage—which gives you a bunch of small, spindly looking caps all huddled together in the middle of the text. If the design calls for caps and small caps—that is, small caps for the word but a full cap for the first letter—it’s even worse, since the full-size caps draw attention to themselves because they look so much heavier than the smaller caps next to them. (If you’re using caps and small caps to spell out an acronym, this might make sense; in that case, you might want the initial caps to stand out. Otherwise, it’s silly. (And—here comes that word again—distracting).

Ellipsis - Back to Basics -

“Don’t be sloppy. Aim for the best.”

16 -

Back to Basics - ELLIPSIS

Above Left: Various typewriter buttons Bottom Left: Punctuation wood-cuts Below: Signage in downtown San Francisco

If it weren’t for a single exception, I’d advise everyone to just forget about the “small caps” command—forget it ever existed, and never, ever, touch it again. (The exception is Adobe InDesign, which is smart enough to find the real small caps in an OpenType font that includes them, and use them when the “Small caps” command is invoked. Unfortunately, InDesign isn’t smart enough, or independent enough, to say “No, thanks,” when you invoke “small caps” in a font that doesn’t actually have any. It just goes ahead and makes those familiar old fake small caps.) You don’t really need small caps at all, in most typesetting situations; small caps are a typographic refinement, not a crutch. If you’re going to use them, use real small caps: properly designed letters with the form of caps, but usually a little wider, only as tall as the x-height or a little taller, and with stroke weights that match the weight of the lowercase and the full caps of the same typeface. Make sure you’re using a typeface that has true small caps, if you want small caps. Letterspace them a little, and set them slightly loose, the same way you would (or at least should) with a word in all caps; it makes the word much more readable.

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 produce 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. Words to live by, I suppose. And, certainly, words to set type by. ~*~ johndberry.com/blog/

Ellipsis - Back to Basics -

The conventions that keep typography neat.

by Robert Bringhurst | Reveared Canadian Writer & Typographer | webtypography.net/intro/

riting 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 - 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 - 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 of your piano, to a professional. If you are the editor of a magazine or the manager of a publishing house, that is probably the best way to proceed. But devoted typographers, like lutenists and guitarists, often feel that they themselves must tune the instruments they play.

Legal Considerations

Check the license before tuning a digital font

Digital fonts are usually licensed to the user, not sold outright, and the license terms 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 what has been rented, leased, or purchased. Printing type was treated the same way from Bí Sheng’s time until the 1980s. Generally speaking, metal type and prototype 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 may 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 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.

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 substitution. 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.

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 line by line, putting space in here, removing it there, and repositioning errang 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.

Keep on fixing

Check every text you set to see where improvements can be made. Then return to the font and make them. Little by little, you and the instrument - the font, that is - will fuse, and the type you set will start to sing. Remember, though, this process never ends. There is no such thing as the perfect font.

Honing the Character Set

If there are defective glyphs, mend them

If the basic letter shapes 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 @ + x = • - — © 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. You may also find that diacritics in glyphs such as å ç ñ ô ü are poorly drawn, poorly positioned, or out of scale with the letterforms.

If text figures, ligatures or other glyphs you need on a regular basis don’t reside on the base font, move them

Ellipsis - Grooming the font -

José Mendoza y Almeida’s Photina is an excellent piece of design, but in every weight and style of Monotype digital Photina, as issued by the foundry, arithmetical signs and other analphabetics are out of scale and out of position, and the copyright symbol and at sight are alien to the font. The raw versions are shown in grey, corrected versions in black.

Frederic Goudy’s Kennerley is a homely but quite pleasant type, useful for many purposes, but in Lanston’s digital version, the letterforms are burdened with some preposterous diacritics. Above left: four accented sorts as issued by the foundry. Above right: corrected versions. All fonts are candidates for similar improvement. Below left: four accented sorts from Robert Slimbach’s carefully honed Minion, as originally issued by Adobe in 1989. Below right: the same glyphs, revised by Slimbach ten years later, while preparing the OpenType version of the face.

For readable text, you almost always need text figures, but most digital fonts are sold with titling figures instead. Most digital fonts also include the ligatures fi and fl but not ff, ffi, ffl, fj, or ffj. You may find at least some of the missing glyphs on a supplementary font (an ‘expert font’), but that is not enough. Put all the basic glyphs together on the base font. If, like a good Renaissance typographer, you use only upright parentheses and brackets (see § 5.3.2), copy the upright forms from the roman to the italic font. Only then can they be kerned and spaced correctly without fuss.

If glyphs you need are missing altogether, make them

Standard ISO digital text fonts (PostScript or TrueType) have 256 slots and carry a basic set of Western European characters. Eastern European characters such as ą ć đ ė ğ ћ ī ň ő ŗ ş ť ů are usually missing. So are the Welsh sorts ŵ and ŷ, and a host of characters needed for African, Asian, and Native American languages. The components required to make these characters may be present on the font, and assembling the pieces is not hard, but you need a place to put whatever characters you make. If you need only a few and do not care

- Grooming the Font - ELLIPSIS

about system compatibility, you can place them in wasted slots - e.g., the ^ < > \ | ~ ` positions, which are accessible directly from the keyboard, or slots such as ¢ ÷ 1 2 3 ™ ꙳ ‰ ¦, which can be reached through insertion utilities or by typing character codes or by customizing the keyboard. If you need to add many such characters, you will need to make a supplementary font, or, better yet, an enlarged font (TrueType or OpenType). If these are for your own use only, the extra characters can be placed wherever you wish. If the fonts are to be shared, every new glyph should be labeled with its PostScript name and Unicode number.

Check and correct the sidebearings

The spacing of letters is part of the essence of their design. A well-made font should need little adjustment, except for refining the kerning. Remember, however, that kerning tables exist for the sake of problematical sequences such as f*, gy, “A, To, Va and 74. If you find that simple pairs such as oo or oe require kerning, this is a sign that the letters are poorly fitted. It is better to correct the side bearings than to write a bloated kerning table. The spacing of many analphabetics, however, has as much to do with editorial style as with typographic design. Unless your fonts are custom made, neither the type designer nor the founder can know what you need or prefer. I habitually increase the left side bearing of semicolon, colon, question and exclamation marks, and the inner bearings of guillemets and parentheses, in search of a kind of Channel Island compromise: neither the tight fitting preferred by most anglophone editors nor the wide-open spacing customary in France. If I worked in French all the time, I might increase these side bearings further.

Three options for the spacing of basic analphabetics in Monotype digital Centaur: foundry issue (top); French spacing (bottom); and something in between. Making such adjustments one by one by the insertion of fixed spaces can be tedious. It is easier by far, if you know what you want and you want it consistently, to incorporate your preferences into the font.

Refine the kerning table

Digital type can be printed in three dimensions, using zinc or polymer plates, and metal type can be printed flat, from photos or scans of the letterpress proofs. Usually, however, metal type is printed in three dimensions and digital type is printed in two. Two-dimensional type can be printed more cleanly and sharply than three-dimensional type,

Right: Typographic Facial Paint Photoshoot

but the gain in sharpness rarely equals what is lost in depth and texture. A digital page is therefor apt to look anemic next to a page printed directly from handset metal. This imbalance can be addressed by going deeper into two dimensions. Digital type is capable of refinements of spacing and kerning beyond those attainable in metal, and the primary means of achieving this refinement is the kerning table. Always check the side bearings of figures and letters before you edit the kerning table. Sideb earrings can be checked quickly for errors by disabling kerning and setting characters, at ample size, in pairs: 11223344 … qqwweerrttyy…. If the spacing within the pairs appears to vary, or if it appears consistently cramped or loose, the sidebarings probably need to be changed. The function of a kerning table is to achieve what perfect side bearings cannot. A thorough check of the kerning table therefore involves checking all feasible permutations of characters: 1213141516 … qwqeqrqtqyquqiqoqp … (a(s(d(f(g(h(j(k(l … ) a)s)d)f)g … -1-2-3-4-5 … TqTwTeTrTtTyTuTiToTp … and so on. This will take several hours for a standard ISO font. For a full pan-European font, it will take several days. Class-based kerning (now a standard capability of font editing software) can be used to speed the process. In class-based kerning, similar letters, such as a á â ä à å ã ă ā ą, are treated as one and kerned alike. This is an excellent way to begin when you are kerning a large font, but not a way to finish. The combinations Ta and Tä, Ti and Tï, il, and íl, i) and ï), are likely to require different treatment. Kerning sequences such as Tp, Tt and f( may seem to you absurd, but they can and do occur in legitimate text. (Tpg is the name of a town in the mountains of Dagestan, near the southern tip of the Russian Federation; Ttanuu is an important historical site on the British Columbia coast; sequences such as y = f(x) occur routinely in mathematics.) If you know what texts you wish to set with a given font, and know that combinations such as these will never occur, you can certainly omit them from the table. But if you are preparing a font for general use, even in a single language, remember that it should accommodate the occasional foreign phrase and the names of real and fictional people, places and things. These can involve some unusual combinations. (A few additional examples: McTavish, FitzWilliam, O’Quinn, dogfish, jack o’-lantern, Hallowe’een.) It is also wise to check the font by running a test file - a specially written text designed to hunt out missing or malformed characters and kerning pairs that are either too tight or too loose. On pages 204-205 is a short example of such a test file, showing the difference between an ungroomed font and a groomed one. It is nothing unusual for a well-groomed ISO font (which might contain around two hundred working characters) to have a kerning table listing

Ellipsis - Grooming the font -

a thousand pairs. Kerning instructions for large OpenType fonts are usually stored in a different form, but if converted to tabular from, the kerning data for a pan-European Latin font may easily reach 30,000 pairs. For a well-groomed Latin-Greek-Cyrillic font, decompiling the kerning instructions can generate a table of 150,00 pairs. Remember, though, that the number isnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t what counts. What matters is the intelligence and style of the kerning. Remember too that there is no such thing as a font whose kerning cannot be improved.

Check the kerning of the word space

The word space - that invisible blank box - is the most common character in almost every text. It is normally kerned against sloping and undercut glyphs: quotation marks, apostrophe, the letters A, T, V, W, Y, and often to the numerals 1, 3, 5. It is not, however, normally kerned more than a hair either to or away from a preceding lowercase f in either roman or italic. A cautionary example. Most of the Monotype digital revivals I have tested over the years have serious flaws in the kerning tables. One problem in particular recurs in Monotype Baskerville, Centaur & Arrighi, Dante, Fournier, Gill Sans, Poliphilus & Blado, Van Dijck and other masterworks in the Monotype collection. These are well-tried faces of superb design - yet in defiance of tradition, the makerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s kerning tables call for a large space (as much as M/4) to be added whenever the f is followed by a word space. The result is a large white blotch after every word ending in f unless a mark of punctuation intervenes.

of an em. But there is no professional dispute about whether it should be on the order of an eight or a quarter of an em. An extra space that large is a prefabricated typographic error - one that would bring snorts of disbelief and instantaneous correction from Stanley Morison, Bruce Rogers, Jan van Krimpen, Eric Gill and others on whose expertise and genius the Monotype heritage is built. But it is an easy error to fix for anyone equipped with the requisite tool: a digital font editor.

Hinting

If the font looks poor at low resolutions, check the hinting

Digital hints are important chiefly for the sake of how the type will look on screen. Broadly speaking, hints are of two kinds: generic hints that apply to the font as a whole and specific hints applicable only to individual characters. Many fonts are sold unhinted, and few fonts indeed are sold with hints that cannot be improved. Manual hinting is tedious in the extreme, but any good font editor of recent vintage will include routines for automated hinting. These routines are usually enough to make a poorly hinted text font more legible on screen. (In the long run, the solution is high-resolution screens, making the hinting of fonts irrelevant except at tiny sizes.)

Naming Conventions

Monotype digital Van Dijck, before and after editing the kerning table. As issued, the kerning table adds 127 units (thousandths of an em) in the roman, and 228 in the italic, between the letter f and the word space. The corrected table adds 6 units in the roman, none in the italic. Other, less drastic refinements, have also been made to the kerning table used in the second two lines.

Professional typographers may argue about whether the added space should be zero, or ten, or even 25 thousandths

- Grooming the Font - ELLIPSIS

The presumption of common law is that inherited designs, like inherited texts, belong in the public domain. New designs (or in the USA, the software in which they are enshrined) are protected for a certain term by copyright; the names of the designs are also normally protected by trademark legislation. The names are often better protected, in fact, because infringements on the rights conferred by a trademark are often much easier to prove than infringements of copyright. Nevertheless there are times when a typographer must tinker with the names manufacturers give to their digital fonts.

Text fonts are generally sold in families, which may include a smorgasbord of weights and variations. Most editing and typesetting software takes a narrower, more stereotypical view. It recognizes only the nuclear family of roman, italic, bold and bold italic. Keyboard shortcuts make it easy to switch from one to another of these, and the switch codes employed are generic. Instead of saying “Switch to such and such a font at such and such a size,” they say, for instance, “Switch to this font’s italic counterpart, whatever that may be.” This convention makes the instructions transferable. You can change the face and size of a whole paragraph or file and the roman, italic and bold should all convert correctly. The slightest inconsistency in font names can prevent this trick from working - and not all manufacturers name their fonts according to

Above: Black & White Typeface Graphic

“For the fonts to be linked, their family names must be identical”

the same conventions. For the fonts to be linked, their family names must be identical and the font names must abide by rules known to the operating system and software in use. If, for example, you install Martin Majoor’s Scala or Scala Sans (issued by FontShop) on a PC, you will find that the italic and the roman are unlinked. These are superbly designed fonts, handsomely kerned and fully equipped with the requisite text figures and small caps - almost everything in a digital font should be but the PC versions must be placed in a font editor and renamed in order to make them work as expected. ~*~

Ellipsis - Grooming the font -

Moving Forward The Future of Type Design

Which typefacesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; styles do you think will be the most popular in the near future and why?

A: The ones that express the Zeitgeist,

In other words: all the styles that are appropriate, fashionable, legible and cool, how ever that may be defined at the time. We do not have one style or fashion (not even within one culture, let alone globally) anymore but many currents at the same time. Type design has always been eclectic. Type has always mirrored what went on in the visual world. These days it does so as quickly as music does and even more quickly than literature and film because you can design and produce a single typeface in a few days, all on your own. It is only the larger, more professional typographic systems that need weeks and months to complete, but even that is less than what it takes to make a movie.

- Erik Spiekermann Professor at the University of the Arts, Bremen, Germany

24 -

Moving Forward - ELLIPSIS

In the Lab The Science Behind Typography

Q: I often feel people take type for granted. But if you were to design a new typeface from scratch, how many different characters would you have to draw? And what proportion of those would exist mainly to serve scientific and mathematical notation? A: Usually, I feel people should take type for granted. After all, if typography is calling attention to itself, it’s taking that attention away from what the words are saying, which I don’t think is usually a good thing. But you’re right in implying that most people have no idea how much goes into designing a typeface. Twenty-six letters in the alphabet, usually with two versions of each, upper and lower case. Punctuation and alternate characters and numbers — let’s not forget numbers — can add another 40 or so. I’m not an expert in typefaces that serve scientific writing, but I’d guess that’s another dozen or two. So you’re talking about over one hundred elements, one hundred little pieces. Each one of them has to stand its own. Yet they all have to go together to create a harmonious reading experience. That’s what makes type design such a lovely intersection of art and science. Q: What is the purpose of good typography?

Good typography, first, makes words readable. At its best, it does something more: it helps express the animating spirit of the ideas behind the words.

- Michael Beirut Design Critic, Educator, & Graphic Designer

Ellipsis - In the Lab -

Above: Closeup of envelopes & cards ÂŠRebecca Woods

26 -

InfLuential - ELLIPSIS

by Rebecca Woods; Graphic Design Student

“B

e the change you wish to see in the world.” This powerful quote applies not only to our everyday interactions as people but to our work as designers as well, and was a driving force in the creation of our group project titled “Influential.”

Team

• Concept Designer & Manager: Rebecca Woods • Financial & Material Organizer: Ashley Schopp • Location Co-ordinator: Sheyla O. • Volunteer & Camera-Man: Kat Ascher

Idea

The idea centered on this desire of connection and positivity, and the word our group chose for the display was “Influential.” I designed a concept for the group where our display was interactive, engaging the individuals that approached it, and where every piece of the display had a section that the individual could keep for themselves. The idea was that these pieces would be small envelopes with cards that people could reach inside and take, with one side have an inspirational quote from influential people throughout history, and the other side having an explanation of our project and an encouragement that we can use typography to positively influence the world.

Project Brief

Budget

As this was a group project, our budget was split between each of our three main members.

Situation

Our group started with a current situation: to create a 3-dimensional typographic display in downtown St. Augustine, Florida that promoted and raised awareness of typography and its role in our world today.

Investigation

Research started with a historic investigation of the city of St. Augustine and of typography through the centuries within the city itself. This research also included combing through footage of other groups who had done this display project in the past, seeing what worked and what the citizens of St. Augustine had responded to before.

Insight

The idea of really communicating with and reaching the citizens of St. Augustine is what inspired the concept for our group’s project. We wanted to create something that people could engage with and learn from, at the same time promoting a positive environment and worldview.

• Paper Envelopes: $64.24 • Business Cards: $53.98 • Cardboard: Free • Labor: Pro bono • Adhesives: ~$35

Research

Past the initial investigation, each one of us delved into the rich history of St. Augustine as a whole. We wanted to make sure that by creating our project we were not only connecting with the citizens, but honoring the city and servicing a need with its people, and to accomplish this we needed to make sure we knew the city and its history. After this information was compiled individually, our next research was to come together as a group and develop a word that we believed best described typography in our world today. Our group chose “Influential” for two reasons;

Ellipsis - Influential -

First was that it perfectly represents how typography today influences us and the decisions that we make on a daily basis, even when we’re not aware. The second, was that the word “influential” was a positive statement, and we wanted our project to make that kind of positive impact on its viewers. After our research was finished, we moved into the concept phase. Our word needed to be a modular creation, with each pixel of the word being a repeated object. We brainstormed long and hard over what this object was, wanting to keep in mind that idea of being “influential” in our world. We also wanted to make sure to keep the cost low, and for a while the idea seemed to be that we were going to use pennies. As I was looking more into the meaning of the word “influential”, and our desire for connection with the people in the community, the idea of creating a positive message solidified in my mind and the concept came to me of using small cards that people could open, revealing a positive quote or message by incredible and inspiring people through history, many of whom visited St. Augustine and were a part of its own history, and that they could take these cards and share them with one another — promoting a positive environment and using both our typographic display and the cards themselves to inspire others to change the world one little white square at a time. Once this concept was solidified with the group, we had to decide on a typeface. We needed one that was very square-heavy so that the cards would fit neatly in the design, and we decided on a typeface called “Alegard”, a pixel based typeface that held roots in cross-stitch design. The last part of our research and concept design was the location of our display. Our letters designs were large, and so we needed a surface that could easily fit each of our letters together in a cohesive group.

28 -

InfLuential - ELLIPSIS

Initially we had planned to use the Old Slave Market, now a Public Market, in the center of downtown St. Augustine, but decided instead to continue on the theme of envelopes and letters and place the display on the red brick exterior of the U.S. Post Office.

Strategy

Our research was now done and it was time to bring our ideas to life. Out of the design and concept phase, we could now focus on acquiring materials and starting construction. In order to keep our display at a manageable size, we chose an envelope size of 2” by 2”, and ordered over 1700 small, white coin envelopes. The cards themselves were much more difficult, as ordering a custom size was not only expensive but would take time. We finally decided to design a buisness-card that could be cut down to the 2” that we needed. The card was left blank on one side for the quotes to be written in, and on the front of every one it said the following:

“Typography is everywhere in our lives, often in places we overlook, but without it we could not function as a society. Type influences the decisions we make, whether through eye-catching design or simply presenting information. It is used to educate and inspire and with it we can positively encourage the world. It is this idea that inspired this group to create an interactive type display that connects with the citizens of St. Augustine.”

We now had the envelopes and their trimmed cards; we just needed a way to mount the pieces onto a surface. Using Adobe Illustrator, I created a layout of the sizes needed to trim down a card-board backing for the envelopes, and each of the group members took these layouts home and worked on the boards individually, attaching the envelopes to one another and finally to the boards. When the day of the display final came, we all came together with our pieces, compiling them into the back of one our girls’ jeep and carting the letter

cut-outs to our new location. Using a combination of double-sided tape and velcro adhesives, we attached the letters to the wall. In a touching way, as we created the word on the side of our building surface, individuals passing through began to stop and talk with

us about the project, some even venturing up to take one of the cards as we built.This kind of interest and engagement continued throughout the night in spades, and the positive reaction and environment we had been hopeful for surpassed every dream we had for the project.

Challenges

No project is complete without mention of the challenges and stumbling blocks that led to its creation and give insight into the reality of working to create something in the real world. Our first and biggest challenge was time. Though we finished strong, and the project created the effect we had desired, our calculation and anticipation of the time it would take to create the display itself was something we severely underestimated. Our second challenge was dealing with location confirmation and changes. After our decision to go with the exterior of the U.S. Post Office, the members of our group reached out to the management there for approval. Unfortunately this waiting stage lasted longer than we’d hoped before we were finally told the exterior of the building could not be used. Desperately seeking not only another space but one that held a connection to the meaning of our project, we next looked into using the side of the local Art Supply Store next door to the Post Office building. There we spoke to owner Melissa Roby, who said she would be pleased to have us use the side of their building. This approval finally got us a space, three days before the final set-up of the display, and in exchange we agreed to encourage onlookers to enter her store as well.

Ellipsis - Influential -

Above: Closeup of letter cutouts ÂŠRebecca Woods

Effectiveness & Learning Stories

Overall, our project was a tremendous success. Not only did we effectively communicate typography and its use and affect in our world to easily around 100 people over the course of the night, but we created positive experiences and connections with those people. The feedback we received both from the individuals viewing and engaging in the display and from our peers and even our instructor continued to be positive throughout the entirety of the project. One woman, heavily active in the art community of St. Augustine, expressed a deep appreciation and gratitude to us for our creation of this project, saying that the real-world display of art was something she had been encouraging and lobbying for for years, and that she hoped we would continue to create works like this.

30 -

InfLuential - ELLIPSIS

Additional information

This project really brought out in me a zest for using design to connect with people. Through the creation of this project and seeing its affects as it was brought to life, I developed a strength in both my technical skills and creative, all while reaching a need within this city. The heartwarming smiles and gleaming eyes that greeted the outcome of our project was truly inspirational, and confirmed our belief that we really can use typography to positively encourage the world. ~*~ rwoods874.tumblr.com

“...we created positive experiences and connections...”

Ellipsis - Influential -