Posts filed under 'typefaces'
August 28th, 2010
Late one night during this past week I was reminded of the torturous times I spent reading of Jan Tschichold, his work, and his own writings, when I found Alex Charchar’s piece, “The Secret Canon & Page Harmony” on the blog Retinart. I say “torturous” because I have all kinds of mixed feelings about him, his work, and his words.
First, my feeling is that, while his “take” on page design should be required reading, I would never call it “the rules,” because it was just such rigidity in which he expressed himself at times that I reject. But I still think there is benefit to learning the way Tschichold thought books should be designed.
I read a translation of “Die neue Typographie” some time ago. I would love to have read—and to own—a copy of The Form of the Book. Only thing is, the one time I had the spare cash to lay out for a copy—it’s apparently rare and, therefore, priced dearly—I opted to spend $400 on a 30-year old bottle of scotch. No regrets there, but I still would give my eyeteeth for a copy of of The Form of the Book.
Tschichold, I think, is hard to appreciate truly without placing him in context. I do not totally reject his theory that the best text page is unadorned and plain, so that nothing comes between the reader and the author’s words. Consider that he came from a time and place when books were typeset in that heavy, unreadable German blackletter type. Just a horribly distracting—and now all but illegible—way to see printed words. But his leap to the plainest sans serif available to him at the time, Akzidenz Grotesk, although both an improvement and the most practical choice available to him led him down a path that, some years later, Tschichold himself plled back from publicly.
As for his perfect text area proportion, there are many harmonious ratios to set type by. Both Bringhurst’s The Elements of Typographic Style and Designing books: practice and theory by Jost Hochuli and Robin Kinross do good jobs of discussing a whole range of such ratios. Bringhurst pays particular attention to those based on organic, mechanical, and musical proportions. Tschichold likely would have none of this, as much as for any reason, I suspect, as that he didn’t think of them. I mean, this was a man who, when he lectured, did not permit questions.
So I do appreciate him, I just don’t cotton to him. And next Christmas I would like another bottle of 30-year old scotch and a copy of The Form of the Book.
May 25th, 2010
Continuing in what has become the busiest year of my life so far, and certainly the most successful in my career as a freelance book designer/layout artist, I am about to begin another “straight layout” job. That is, where I am provided a template and make some other designer’s pages.
This is, you might say, a return to my roots. I worked at least a couple of years doing such book layout work in the early ’90s before I hired on for my first interior design and layout job. I have always felt that starting out in publishing as a proofreader forced me to see, in an unerringly stripped down fashion, how words on a printed page are supposed to look. This, in turn, fostered a nitpicky concern for typography generally and an intolerance for crappy (to use the term of art) wordspacing specifically.
Doing page layout in those beginning years I simply gravitated to a line-by-line scan/search technique with my eyes—that is, looking line-by-line—to find every spot on every page in every book I worked where I might “drive a truck” through the wordspacing because it seemed so wide to me.
I took that feel for typography with me into book design projects. I always try to select types, type sizes, and line lengths that work together for maximum flexibility and efficiency in terms of how a line of type can be adjusted to avoid wide wordspacing.
So it is with a sort of “coming home” feeling that I will begin my first layout-only job in a while.
March 10th, 2010
I remember … my first book, actually, seventeen years ago. I started with straight layout jobs; I didn’t begin to design books for years after that beginning. That first layout job was a math textbook. A good fit, as it happened, since I had earned a living as a proofreader—both in-house and freelance—for about fifteen years before that.
A math textbook, before I knew about MathType or XTensions for creating equations, meant a lot of cutting and pasting radical symbols, indicating square roots, combining many characters, and a world of back-kerning.
The autobiography/memoir I am currently working on reminded me of that first math book. Written by a retired physicist, an older gentleman who began life in India, is also the author’s attempt to preserve his native language. What this means—thank heavens not learning Sanskrit—is using one or more typefaces that transliterate the Sanskrit into English.
And so specialized fonts are in order. But there is the additional factor, really a kind of monkeywrench to overcome, of my working on the Macintosh platform—you may have heard me mention this before—and the author and editor working on PCs. This effectively throws us into further translation mode. Even though all three of us have purchased the appropriate fonts, the textfiles I have received to this point, and the printouts I had received until just yesterday, all had accented characters missing or replaced by tiny outlined squares.
I will need a complete copy of the manuscript and, interestingly, this job will force me to do something I’ve scrupulously avoided to this point: reading a book through as I work on designing and laying it out. It is now imperative I follow through, line by line and even character by character, typing in every missing character. Without the hard copy it will be a lot like Plato’s example of the distorted picture of reality one gets from observing the world only via shadows projected onto a cave wall.
How I wish these typefaces would just apply upon my importing the textfiles that have been created and worked on with the PC version of the fonts. Hopefully, just that will happen—if not magically, than by something we figure out—before I get too much deeper into this project.
February 21st, 2010
The use of type in books—choosing and combining it with other typefaces—brings the art vs. craft of book design, compared to typography, right to the fore.
Joel Friedlander writes a thoughtful piece, 3 Great Typeface Combinations You Can Use in Your Book, on the subject, from the matching perspective, it seems to me. I take another look here, from the contrasting end.
Starting with the premise that main body type has been chosen—perhaps by period and/or place, by the look of the typeface simply seeming somehow representative of the subject, or by the type’s appearance running counter to what the book is about—the very next thing is to choose a second face for display and all other non-body text uses.
For instance, last year I did interior and cover design and layout on a book named The Sutton-Taylor Feud: The Deadliest Blood Feud in Texas. It told the story of an epic family feud that began shortly after the Civil War ended and lasted past into the last decade of the nineteenth century. When I first began talking to the publisher about this book the expression “of biblical proportion” came to mind. From that, it was easy for me to start looking at old style serif types. But also cognizant that the time period wasn’t truly back to the old style era, from about 1495 through about 1725, I wanted something that was a more contemporary turn on an old style. Sabon fits the bill, as it is old style but was created by one of the masters, Jan Tschichold, “in the period 1964–1967,” according to Wikipedia.
Given that this book has Texas roots, I decided to go with a typeface that had a Western feel to it for the only non-body text elements of this book that require a display face. In the sample below, that would be the large initial cap, in Rosewood Standard Regular.
Coincidentally, I recently finished another book with historical overtones, and—again, coincidentally—though from a different publishing client, the client was another college press in Texas. This book had a whole different tone from the first. Lust, Violence, Religion: Life in Historic Waco is a sometimes bawdy, always a good read. And I did my best to make it a good- and interesting-looking book.
I chose a typeface for body text that again went with the notion of historical import—a small wink at the aforementioned bawdy character of the essays—Adobe Jenson Pro. When researching this face, the word “elegant” comes up again and again. Jenson is simply beautiful, a revival of Renaissance lines and curves. It gives weight to the subject matter it presents and, again, this seemed to fit nicely with the unexpectedly irreverent storyline (for, history or not, the book reads as entertainingly as any great story).
For the accompanying sans serif—to be used in titles, display heads, and captions—I selected Optima. Not strictly a sans, of course, Optima’s hint of serifs, tapered strokes, and slightly larger x-height than the Jenson all keep with the elegant look I had in mind for this book. Below is a page Lust, Violence, Religion.
These are just two ways to go about pairing, but not exactly matching, type.
February 10th, 2010
I came upon an interesting article the other day, Know your type: Cheltenham. The article describes the history of the typeface family Cheltenham. It reminded me of an exchange I had on one of the typeface aficionados’ forums a year or two ago. I mentioned that I liked ITC Cheltenham and had decided to use it on a book design I was doing at the time.
I must admit right off that I am partial to Old Style type—Did you know “Garalde” comes from bringing together the names “Garamond” and “Aldus”? A few of my favorites are Bembo, Adobe Garamond, Jenson, and, of course, Cheltenham. I especially like that the contrast between thick and thin strokes is not extreme with Old Style typefaces.
When I mentioned hw much I liked Cheltenham on that forum, I heard a chorus of “boos” in pretty short order. Indeed, I don’t remember anything in the way of approval for my choice. This puzzled me.
I made clear I intended to use Cheltenham for body text of the book I had in mind. And as the idsgn piece makes clear, the original Cheltenham font was designed to be “a book type in which legibility would be the dominant element.” As that is the point of good typography, and book design—to make lines of legible and pages of readable type—I still feel very good about the choice. The unique kind of look that stops readers in their tracks might be a good thing for advertising, movie posters, and even book covers; but on book interior pages, it’s just an unwanted and unadvisable distraction.
The extended ascenders and shortened descenders are, in fact, odd-looking in an interesting way; and it was good enough for the New York Times. But that was the original Cheltenham, also known as “Chelt.” By the time of ITC’s digitized Cheltenham, the x-height was increased noticeably to make a most readable type. A classic was adapted and made far better for book interiors.
January 23rd, 2010
Goes back to the structure of a page, what the text area looks like in relation to the size and proportion of the sheet of paper the page gets printed on.
I know … sounds like I just launched into another surefire cure for insomnia. But when knowing this stuff matters, well, hell, it matters.
First, I want to say once more in this space that my knowledge of all things typographical comes to me in two distinct ways: from my study—i.e., reading—and from my own work at solving the issue of how to put large amounts of words on many printed pages. Although I continue to read anything new about book design and typography that I get my hands on, my foundation remains these three books:
- Bringhurst’sThe Elements of Typographic Style
- Hochuli and Kinross’s Designing books: practice and theory
- Hendel’s On Book Design
And, again, I add on to everything I have read and every layout I have ever doped out or followed (when supplied a template by a client) with each new working out of the issues each new project presents. But over time a rough “order to the universe” revealed itself and, for me, it goes as follows.
One-column is the ticket for fiction and straight text without any kind of art. Non-fiction, especially textbooks, with display material—equations and scientific formulae, for instance—are also particularly suited for the one-column page. 65 to 68 characters, studies show, are about the maximum number for readers’ best comprehension. And about 26 to 30 picas work best for line measure. So the trick is, then, to work out the size of a particular typeface that gives you those 65 to 68 characters on the line length you decide to go with.
Ample white space—margins—also helps readability. Leading, the space added on to type size to give the measure from one baseline of type to the next, also affects white space and readability. I remember reading some time ago that the using larger amounts of leading was trending. And so I began to experiment. I had originally earned that adding 20% to the type size was the rule of thumb for figuring out what leading to use. So, for example, 10 point type would be set on 12 point leading, and 11 point type on 13.2 points.
The piece I read that spoke of this new trend made fun of it, saying something to the effect that book designers then were falling all over themselves to use larger and larger amounts of leading. Truth is, of course, a limit should only be based on how things look on the page. And you realize that limit by seeing when enough is enough and the type just looks badly set. Myself, I’ve recently used 10/14 and 11/15 with results that I like a lot.
Not every typeface you work with will look good in the size and leading combination that suits another typeface. That is why one-size-fits-all templates are not the economical panacea that some book design mills claim.
Next time: the two-column page
March 22nd, 2009
The first typeface I used, once I had a laser printer and no longer relied on dot matrix output, was Avant Garde. Two things about this sans serif type stuck me: its interestingly large x-height and the fact that it was not Helvetica.
This was back in 1989, long before the movie, the hoopla, and the inevitable backlash against Helvetica (the typeface). Tired of it after a dozen years of mostly math and science proofreading, I had seen enough Helvetica to last a long, long time.
A geometric sans, Avant Garde’s strokes seemed to run thinner than Helvetica. This makes for a page lighter in color and a kind of artiness in type that I had never noticed before.
The second typeface I cottoned to was the serif Palatino. To my eye—and this continues to hold to this day—Palatino possesses an easy elegance. This is likely not an unusual observation and I am not alone in my admiration of Palatino, as if it is one of the ten most used typefaces, according to Wikipedia.
Unlike many newcomers to computer typesetting—I never cared for the expression “desktop publishing”—I knew enough not to use every font in my arsenal in a single document simply because I could. In that respect my proofreading background served me well, helping me make good judgments (for the most part) about how words should look on the printed page.
Maybe because of that, I ran Avant Garde and Palatino into the ground. Probably a whole year passed before I even tried the other typefaces my LaserWriter IInt came with. None of those others hit the spot the way the first two had.
And yet all these years later, I find it fun that the choice of a typeface for body text can be determined by a client’s asking me to find a serif type with a lowercase g that, looked at sideways, suggests a pair of eyeglasses.
July 7th, 2007
With all apologies to Smashing Magazine …
Smashing Magazine has posted the results of a survey they took, “35 Designers x 5 Questions”, that I found almost as helpful a piece to use as a starting point for brainstorming as any I have ever read. The one hitch is that it’s for web designers—although maybe not. When I find myself in a funk and don’t know where to start, it really makes no difference to me what creative endeavor I read about.
Nevertheless, I thought five such questions aimed specifically at book designers—and it would be helpful if respondents mentioned whether they were aspiring or actually have books they designed in print—might make for a goldmine of ideas for when any of us is stuck in a creative rut. As it happens, I stopped at four.
So, again, with all due apologies to Smashing Magazine, here are my five—uh, four—(sometimes multi-part) questions for book designers, adapted from their own five for web designers:
- Name the first aspect of designing a book that you give priority to once you accept a project and sit down to start.
- Has InDesign proven to be the Quark killer for you; and, if so, what was the feature that did it; or do your clients determine which software you use?
- What”s the first font comes to mind for body text each time you begin a book design project; and do you usually stick with that choice or say something like, “Yes, I really like that font, but it”s time to work with something else”?
- Name one design-related book you highly recommend to book designers—please don”t suggest Tschichold’s The New Typography (Die neue Typographie) as I am just up to here with that book, as much of an earth-shaker as it was.
That”s all I have. Let”s see what you”ve got.
June 29th, 2007
Last week I picked at things that irritated me about the 1987 first English translation of Jan Tschichold’s The New Typography (Die neue Typographie). To be fair, it now appears to me that I reacted—mostly to Robin Kinross’ excellent Introduction—to the statement that the typesetting of the translation remained true to 1928’s original. On further review, I think I made a too-hasty judgment on the whole notion of a “new typography”. In fact, the heavy ornamentalism that I agree dominated, specifically, the book making and, generally, the typesetting of the day, deserved to go.
My last reservation, quite simply, concerns books full of sanserif type. To which I just say, “No, don’t! Please!!” And, fortunately, most everyone seems to agree.
But as I got deeper into the book—and it is a relatively slim volume—I began to see virtues that won me over. So much so, that I plan an homage to “die neue typographie”. Particularly in the shortest of pieces, postcards, Tschichold’s examples appealed to me. I think I will appropriate the design of one such postcard quite freely—on page 59; the caption reads, “THEO VAN DOESBURG: Postcard. Black and red on white—and give it a liberal interpretation.
It seems the least I can do after I was so dismissive the first time I wrote anything about The New Typography.
June 22nd, 2007
In the movie, The Usual Suspects, there’s a scene in which it begins to sink in to those of us watching that if Keyser Soze exists, it may only be in Kevin Spacey’s character Verbal’s mind. Spacey steps outside the stationhouse he’s just been questioned in and his torturously twisted body slowly, exquisitely, straightens up.
Apropos of nothing, I reminded myself of that scene the other night. Walking out of the public library favoring my recently broken right leg, I leaned on the cane in my left hand. The leg is healing, but the day had been a long, tiring one and I was dragging. I looked at the book I had gone to pick up, a translation of Jan Tschichold’s 1928 work, The New Typography (Die neue Typographie). Looking at the front cover, I noticed the year the The New Typography had been published originally. I smiled to myself, stood erect and walked to my car without the cane touching the ground.
I anticipated opening the book and starting to read the whole drive home. The little I know about Tschichold’s original stance on a new typography appealed to me: an emphasis on a clean, modern look and away from ornamentation. Having always wondered about the use of Gothic-style type, heavily ornamented but hardly the most legible, I felt sure Tschichold’s writing would illuminate a whole path that led straight to the typography and page design I believe in.
Later, I opened the book to the Introduction, the lead-in to Tschichold’s actual translated text. A number of pages in, I read, “roman as a minimum demand … sanserif as the preferred choice … ” explaining what I found as the main textface.
… for the purposes of characterizing Tschichold”s preference, “Aksidenz Grotesk” in a light (as opposed to medium or regular) weight is sufficient description. He wanted to show that such a typeface could be easily read in continuous text … despite common belief that serif text is more legible.
I stopped and flipped around, not reading now but simply looking at the typesetting and design. The nicest way I might describe what I saw is “rough”. The last line of a recto page jumped out at me: it ended with a broken word and a hyphen. The last line of a paragraph on another page ended with a broken word. This was the Introduction. And no indents to a paragraph’s first line—throughout, not merely for the first paragraph of a new chapter or section.
I turned to the book”s end, hoping for an explanatory colophon. An endnote began:
This first publication of the English-language version of Jan Tschichold’s Die neue Typografie (1928) has attempted to follow the author”s original page layouts and design precepts as closely as possible.
I have already read elsewhere that Tschichold later renounced much of his earlier views on a new typography. But is there any chance that the last-quoted line above is an attempt to blame a horrible-looking little book on a dead man who cannot defend himself?
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