The Professional Look – Part VII
The Professional Look, The Complete Guide to Desktop Publishing, is a book I co-authored with Scott Tilden in 1991. Each Thursday I post an excerpt from the chapter I wrote about typography. Many of you dye-subbers also design some of the graphics you print, which includes setting type. Hopefully these posts will give you new insights into typography. Click here for my previous post.
Leading: Controlling inner space
The spacing between lines of type is called leading by typographers. The term remains from earlier times when typographers literally inserted thin strips of metal between lines of type. With the advent of computerized typesetting, leading is often called line spacing. We control line spacing with substantially more accuracy than we do in typewriting, often to to 1 point or less. Some DTP software packages, such as Quark Xpress, control line spacing to .001 of an inch. Line spacing can be more than, equal to, or even less than the point size of the type, depending upon how closely together the lines of type are set.
Anatomy of type: The head and the body
Most of your typesetting will fall into two categories: the larger words that attract attention and summarize the content, called headlines, or heads for short, or paragraphs of copy that compose your material, called text or body type.
Headlines: Making a big point
Generally you’ll want to go with sans-serif typefaces for headlines because in the normally larger sizes used — 14 points and up — sans-serif styles stand out well and make a fast read.
Many of the most-successful roadside billboards, where passing readers typically have six to eight seconds to get the message, use sans-serif type. In newspapers, or on any page made up of several blocks of copy, the headline size tells readers the relative importance of the story. Larger heads attract more readers. Up to a point — 36 points, to be exact (about half an inch) according to research. Use type larger than 36 points for design reasons only; you won’t attract proportionally more readers. Another study shows no difference in legibility in type sizes from 14 to 30 points.
Body type
Research results are clear: When the time comes to choose text copy, go with serif type. When the eye has finished reading one line of type, it more easily tracks back to the beginning of the next line when it can follow along an imaginary line formed by the serifs along the baseline of the type. Other studies say that, since nearly all the reading textbooks we studied in grammar school used serif typefaces for body copy, we feel most comfortable reading serif typefaces. A study of newspaper front pages by Sandra Utt and Steve Pasternak, published in Journalism Quarterly, confirms it; 95.6 percent of newspapers use serif type.
Next week: When you can’t — or won’t — body serif, and Body type: Bigger is better
Tags: body type, headlines, leading, legibility, line spacing, sans serif
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