What I Know About Columns, Part I

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

Entry Filed under: book design,typefaces