OPUS
Anywhere and everywhere
Volume One
Type Casting by Steven Brower
From Paperback to Design
Back To Basics by John Berry
Stopping Sloppy Typography
Grooming the Font by Robert Bringhurst
Smart Design Choices
The Influence of Typography by Sheyla Urbina
A Modern Interactive Installation
Content
Issue 01
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Kinetic Typography by Carrie Cousins
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Font Kerning by Brian Hoff
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Type Casting by Steven Brower
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Back To Basics by John Berry
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Understanding Typographic Hierarchy by Jeremy Loyd
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Grooming the Font by Robert Bringhurst
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Brief Notes on the First Italic by Carrie Cousins
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The Influence of Typography by Sheyla Urbina
An Introductory Guide 5 Expert Tips
From Paperback to Design
Stopping Sloppy Typography Webpage Techniques Smart Design Choices
St. Catherine, Bad Feet and The First Italic A Modern Interactive Installation
30 Fontology by Allan Haley It’s About Legibility
Editor in Chief | Sheyla Urbina (407) 130 - 7900 surbina193@flagler.edu
Media Specialist | Lily James (407) 382 - 7323 ljames215@gmail.com
Creative Director | Joseph Somarriba (407) 543 - 5469 jsomarriba93@gmail.com
Editor | Hector Garcia (407) 064 - 5644 hgarcia456@gmail.co,
Publisher’s Letter
Dear Readers, This issue of Opus is bringing you engaging articles written by prominent typographers with different experiences willing to spread their knowledge. Steven Brower’s article titled Type Casting gives insight into the smart decision making that goes into choosing a typeface. Robert Bringhurst’s article, Grooming the Font shows the ways to navigate the tricky ways around special characters. These two along with articles about the latest typography innovations, projects, and discoveries are all found in this issue. The columns found in this issue give you a way to keep up with the latest events going on in different areas of typography. Tips, current events, history, etc. Enjoy the first issue of Opus and all it has to offer with it’s ability to give you all you need to know about the world of type every month. Sincerely, Your Editor
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Kinetic Typography An Introductory Guide Carrie Cousins
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inetic typography puts this together with some simple animations to create words that move on the screen, grabbing your attention and engaging the senses. Kinetic typography refers to the creation of moving type. It is an animation technique that is used to make lettering expand, shrink, fly, move in slow motion, grow and change in numerous ways for the user. The effect can be simple and short with only small changes or quite elaborate and lengthy. Kinetic typography use has almost exploded recently because of more use of the technique in web design. Once something that was only used in video and television, kinetic typography is gaining popularity as a background effect on websites and in web-based videos. (All of this is possible thanks to higher and more common broadband and increased internet and web surfing speeds.) The technique used for a number of reasons but can add emphasis to certain content. It can help convey tone and emotion. It can help create a unique visual where none exists. It can be an affordable option for those with limited budgets. It can add interest when your design is in need of a boost. It’s been used in credits, during shows and for advertisements. A notable use of kinetic typography in advertising came in 2009 when Pepsi launched a “Refresh Everything” campaign (now called “Pepsi Pulse”) with a new logo. The new design – featuring a logo in place of the letter ‘o’ – appeared everywhere from television to online using movable type. More recently, it has become a widely-used technique in website design (and for some mobile apps as well) and is quite common in online videos. It is used for everything from advertising O and promotion to art to music videos to a storytelling tool for journalists.
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Font Kerning 5 Expert Tips Brian Hoff
We explain both the fundamentals and the finer points of kerning. Follow our pro advice and you’ll soon be on your way to achieving typographic perfection. Kerning is the process of adjusting the spacing between letters to achieve a visually pleasing result. Some designers find it easy, others find it a tricky process where success is achieved more by luck than real judgment. But follow O these tips and you should find yourself on the right track.
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Blur your eyes While kerning display typefaces (you should only be kerning display typefaces by the way), I like to blur my eyesight a bit by squinting or crossing my eyes. This enables me to focus on the contrast and white space of the letterforms without becoming distracted by the characters themselves.
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Flip the typeface upside down Another useful exercise for kerning is to turn the typeface upside-down. This allows you to focus on the form of the characters rather than getting distracted by the actual word being viewed. Upside-down text becomes more abstract and enables you to focus on lights (white space) and dark (the characters) areas.
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upply two versions of a logo Kerning typefaces for logos can be quite tricky, since logo typefaces can be viewed at very large or very small sizes. I recommend supplying clients, when needed, with two sets: more tightly kerned pairs for large sizes and looser for the smaller uses of the logo.
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Create rhythm and consistency The best font kerning (and the best typography) has good rhythm and consistency. One character sitting next to another should appear rhythmic and balanced. One way of achieving this is to step back from the monitor and observe the text. Does the text ‘box’ appear as one equal shade? Or does it appear darker between some characters and lighter between others?
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Two useful websites For us really picky, detailed web folk, try looking at www.kernjs.com and www.letteringjs.com. The second one is a jQuery plug-in that enables selectable HTML text on the web to be kerned and controlled in other profound ways.
Type Casting From Paperback to Design
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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 loved 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” x 7”, although I have yet to wear a pocket they fit comfortably into), were viewed in the design 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 the trade paper edition, 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 down, 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
Steven Brower stevenbrowerdesign.com
Steven Ian Brower is an American graphic designer, and writer. His work appears regularly in international and national design annuals and books on design, and he writes for several publications. Brower attended the High School of Music & Art and the School of Visual Arts in New York City and is a graduate of California State University, Fullerton and National University. He is currently on the faculty of Marywood University in Scranton, Pennsylvania and The School of Visual Arts in New York City.
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. 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 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. 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. 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 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.) 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 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 appreciate 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 “as any sculpture or painted picture.” I developed an appreciation for the rules of typography. The Rules 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 a 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 intentions, 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,
Sans Serif Franklin Gothic Futura Gill Sans News Gothic Trade Gothic
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Serif Bodoni Caslon Cheltenham Garamond
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 the 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 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 a 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. 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 line ends and another 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 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 point 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 about. 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 Reid Miles’ Blue note album covers. He answered, “Because I thought it was cool.” I lectured him profusely on selecting type simple based on its “coolness”. Later, I relayed the incident to Seymour Chwast, of the legendary Pushpin Group (formerly Pushpin Studios). He observed that Clarendon 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 woodtype 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 ads 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.” Still, bad use of the good type is much less desirable than good use of bad type. When I first began 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. O
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Back to Basics
Stopping Sloppy Typography John D. Berry http://johndberry.com
John Berry usually describes himself as an editor & typographer — reflecting his care for both the meaning of words and how they are presented. He writes, speaks, and consults extensively on typography, and he has won numerous awards for his book designs. He has been a program manager on the Fonts team at Microsoft, where he established improved typographic standards for Windows and other Microsoft products. He teaches typography and design at Cornish College of the Arts. He lives in Seattle with the writer Eileen Gunn.
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here’s 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 that 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’, 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 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 the billboard, it would have been very effective.
But unless the billboards along Highway 101 have become 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. But clearly, this isn’t the case – or else a lot of designers skipped that part of the class, or have simple 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.
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 sometimes 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.) 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 a 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.O
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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 they fly. (I’, 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 they 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.
Understanding Typographic Hierarchy Webpage Techniques Jeremy Loyd
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ne of the most important techniques for effectively communicating (or “honoring”) content is the use of typographic hierarchy. Typographic hierarchy is a system for organizing type that establishes an order of importance within the data, allowing the reader to easily find what they are looking for and navigate the content. It helps guide the reader’s eye to where a section begins and ends, whilst enabling the user to isolate certain information based on the consistent use of style throughout a body of text. It should be pointed out that when designing for the web, there’s another layer to take into account. A webpage itself has a hierarchy that not only is read, but contains interaction. The page as a whole must be designed in a way that clearly communicates to the user what actions are available and how to easily access the information they seek, how to purchase an item, etc. For the purpose of this article, however, we’re talking strictly about hierarchy as it applies to type. Luckily for us, we have our own handy HTML tag that lets us semantically establish typographic hierarchy into the websites we build. Heading tags (H tags) allow us to specify an order of importance into our content: H1 through H6, H1 being most important, H6 being least. Search engines use this data to interpret priority of content on a webpage. But how do we effectively style those H tags in way that makes sense with our content? Glad you asked! Styling Techniques There are a few basic methods for establishing a visual typographic hierarchy: - Size - Weight - Color - Position - Type Contrast Most commonly these methods are used in combination with each other. In the concert list shown earlier, size, color, spacing, and type contrast were all used. The combinations are literally endless. O
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“Typography exists to honor content.” - Robert Bringhurst: The Elements of Typographic Style
Grooming The Font Smart Design Choices Robert Bringhurst Robert Bringhurst.com
Robert Bringhurst OC is a Canadian poe translated substantial works from Haida Arabic. He wrote The Elements of Typog glyphs and the visual and geometric arra of the Order of Canada in June 2013.
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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 whether the car or the piano has been rented, leased or purchased. Printing type was treated the same way from Bí Shēng’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 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. 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. 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, 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 at 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 to work your way through it line 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. 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 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. You may also find that diacritics in glyphs such as å ç é ñ ô ü are poorly drawn, poorly positioned, or out of scale with the letterforms. I + 2 = 3 < 9 > 6 ± I 2 × 4 a + b = c a@b © 2007 I+2=3 <9> 6±I 2×4 a + b = c a@b © 2007 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 sign are alien to the font. The raw versions are shown in grey, corrected versions in black. éùôã → éùôã Frederic Goudy’s Kennerley is a homely but quite pleasant type, useful for many purposes,
et, typographer and author. Bringhurst has and Navajo, as well as classical Greek and graphic Style â&#x20AC;&#x201C; a reference book of typefaces, angement of type. He was named an Officer
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but in Lanston’s digital version, the letterforms are burdened with some preposterous diacritics. Above left: four accented sorts are 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. áèïû→ áèïû If text figures, ligatures or other glyphs you need on a regular basis don’t reside on the base font, move them. 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, 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, 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 ħ ī ň ő ŗ ș ť ů are usually missing. So are the Welsh sorts ŵ and ŷ, and 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 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 ¢ ÷123 ™ ☐ 0/00 1/1, 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 sidebearings 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 to prefer. I habitually increase the left sidebearing 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 sidebearings further. abc: def; ghx? klm! <<non>> abc: def; ghx? klm! <<hmm>>
Page 18 abç: déf; ghx? klm! <<oui>> 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, suing 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, but the gain in sharpness rarely equals what is lost in depth and texture. A digital page is therefore apt to look aenemic 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 sidebearings of figures and letters before you edit the kerning table. Sidebearings 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 sidebearings probably need to be changed. The function of a kerning table s to achieve what perfect sidebearings cannot. A thorough check of the kerning table therefore involves checking all feasible permutations of characters: 1213141516 … qwqeqrqtqyquqiqoqpq …
(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 ā ă ä 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 T ï, 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. (Tpig 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’en.) 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 a thousands
Is it east of the sun and west of the moon – or is it west of the moon and east of the sun? 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 of an em. But there is no professional dispute about whether it should be on the order of an eighth of 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 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 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 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 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. O
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pairs. Kerning instructions for large OpenType fonts are usually stored in a different form, but if converted to tabular form, 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 150,000 pairs. Remember, though, that the number isn’t what counts. What matters is the intelligence and style of 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 half 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-tired faces of superb design – yet in defiance of tradition, the maker’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.
Brief Notes on the First Italic St. Catherine, Bad Feet and The First Italic
W
henever we think about the invention of the italic typeface we invariably think of the year 1501, when the italic type, commissioned by Aldus Manutius and cut by Griffo, was employed to set a new series of small pocket books, first published in 1501. Aldus, writing to his friend, the eminent Italian scholar, Scipio Carteromachus: “We have printed, and are now publishing, the Satires of Juvenal and Persius in a very small format, so that they may more conveniently
be held in the hand and learned by heart (not to speak of being read) by everyone.” However, the Aldine Italic type does make an appearance — albeit a very brief one — in a much larger folio edition of 1500: The Epistole of St. Catherine of Siena, set within a beautiful woodcut illustration (not so the feet) of St. Catherine herself. The italic appears printed across the open book and heart in either hand. Interestingly, the book was commissioned by Margherita
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“So that they may more conveniently be held in the hand and learned by heart (not to speak of being read) by everyone.”
Ugelheimer, widow of Peter Ugelheimer, former business partner and close friend to Nicholas Jenson. The main text of this book is set in his lovely second roman typeface (Type 2:114R) first employed in 1495, and used to beautiful effect in Aldus’s famed Hypnerotomachia Poliphili of 1499. And, no, I don’t know why those two angels are holding three crowns above St. Catherine’s head. I guess it symbolizes either the Trinity or, as in the case of the three crowns on the Pope’s Tiara or triregnum, the threefold power of the pontiff. Or, it might symbolize the three virtues written across the scroll (above the heart): Dulce signum charitatis. / Castitatis, / Cor mutat in Virgine. (charity, chastity, and something about the heart of the Virgin (Mary). O
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The Influence of Typography
A Modern Interactive Installation
Sheyla Urbina
oh-sheyla.tumblr.com Sheyla is a student at Flagler College. She has interned at three different companies and has had freelance design work. Orginially from Lake Mary, Fl, she has lived in St. Augustine while completing her undergraduate degree. Set to graduate in mid-December, she plans to be hired by a boutique firm.
M
aking the public see that Typography is an important part of everyday society was our main goal. The best way to do this is to first have people get people interested in our installation and then we wanted to have then interact with it. The result was an amazing experience of people appreciating not only our work but also typography.
interactive with the public.
Idea After a lot of talking, googling, etc we decided on using Influential to accurately encompass what we thought typography meant to the modern world. Influential was best because itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s the only word that encompasses the whole of what typography is. No matter what aspect of Challenge type that you look at, itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s always influencing you. The Our group was presented with a challenge of creating an concept was revolved around the idea of spreading posiinstallation consisting of pixels that are made up of a man tivity and getting the public to interact with the installation. made object. The Installation was to be a word that we The pixels were to be made out of 2x2 envelopes with thought encompassed what typography means to the cards inside that had an explanation of the project plus an modern world. This installation was to be presented during inspiring quote on the back. Art Walk in St. Augustine, Florida. Research Investigation The main research we did was about the history of St. In order to figure out the word we wanted to use we Augustine. The location we chose had to accurately reflect brainstormed both individually and as a group. The way what we were trying to portray in our installation. Our we did this was to come up with phrases and then words original location was based in the old slave market that we thought described typography. We researched located in the central park by St. George Street. After previous projects to get an idea of how we wanted to much discussion with Professor Lucianna Gassett we execute the installation. Then we looked for the best object decided that it was best to find a different location in order to effectively work with the word and that would be to prevent any misconceptions of what our meaning was.
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Team Members Sheyla Urbina Ashley Schoop Rebecca Woods
Then we had to research the best verbage to put on the cards that would go inside the envelopes. The front explanation and the quotes that were to go on the back had to show our overall concept. The quotes needed to come from people that were the most influential of not only our time but of all time. Location Our first location was the Post Office on King Street. We thought that the traffic in that particular area gave us the best chance of getting a lot of people to interact with our project. That fell through so we decided on the side of the local art building on the other side of the street. The tie in between the art store and our project was even more perfect than the post office. As it is also on King street we felt confident in the amount of foot traffic that was going to pass through. Process The first step in getting the installation to come to life was to decide on how many envelopes, cards and other materials we would need. Using Illustrator we mocked up the envelopes to create yard tall letters. Then after a lot of deliberation we decided the best way to get the envelopes to meet the requirements of being yard tall was to attatch them to cardboard peices. We did this with double sided tape. After getting the envelopes on the cardboard we had to cut the excess off and into the shape of our choosen typface. Then we individually wrote quotes from the people we deemed influential and handwrote them on the back. Putting them inside of the cards was the last step in getting it all ready. Installation Putting the letters up proved to be a difficult part of the installation as the wall we were using didn’t stick to the material we were using. After a lot more tape than orginally planned, we got the letters up by measuring the
distance between them and making sure they were all at the same height. Effectiveness The amount of postive feedback we got from the public was more than we could have ever imagined. People were immensely curious of what our goals were. After explaining our process and the challenge we were faced with, they all loved the idea and the execution. The best part was seeing people getting the cards out and all loving the quotes. The best part was the way that people engaged in conversation about typography and them agreeing with us about the influence it has on the world around us and us as individuals. Challenges Perhaps the biggest challenge was the post office falling through. The manager wasn’t sure what he was allowed to do and having to find a new location in such short notice was extremely stressful. The second hardest challenge to deal with was the letters not immediately sticking to the wall as we hoped. It took a lot more tape than we anticipated and the wind didn’t help. We had to be careful when people tried to take cards out of the envelopes as they tended to pull the letters off the wall. We quickly were able to fix the problem, but it was quite worriesome in the beginning. O
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Budget - Envelopes: $64.24 - Cards: $53.98 - Cardboard: $4 - Tape: $35
It’s About Legibility
Allan Haley
It’s an informal measure of how easy it is to distinguish one letter from another in a particular typeface. Typographic clarity comes in two flavors: legibility and readability. What’s the difference? Legibility is a function of typeface design. It’s an informal measure of how easy it is to distinguish one letter from another in a particular typeface. Readability, on the other hand, is dependent upon how the typeface is used. Readability is about typography. It is a gauge of how easily words, phrases and blocks of copy can be read. While the argument continues to rage about whether sans serifs are easier to read than serif fonts in text copy, sans serif typefaces, because their letter shapes are simpler, have been proven to be slightly more legible than their serifed cousins. Situational Typography Specific situations or contexts can also affect typeface legibility. For example, if copy has a lot of numerals, a sans serif face may be the best choice. The reason? Sans serif numerals are simpler and have more recognizable character shapes than their roman counterparts. Then there are times when you have a lot to say–and not much room in which to say it. In instances like these, faces with condensed proportions are the best choice. Condensed typefaces of light to medium weight also work well in cramped typographic quarters because their counters are not prone to filling in. Sans serif faces are almost always the safest choice because their individual character shapes tend to be more legible. A serif typeface such as ITC Garamond Condensed or Galena Condensed can be effective as small as 8 point or 9 point, but when smaller sizes are required, a sans serif like Generica Condensed or Abadi Condensed are better options. Even though virtually anyone can set type today, there are still many skills that separate the typographer and graphic designer from the desktop publisher. Picking the absolute best–and sometimes the most legible–typeface is one of those skills. O
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Fontology