The Professional Look – Part VIII
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.
When you can’t — or won’t — body serif
Sometimes you will have to use sans-serif body type (the boss says you must, or it’s called for in a corporate style book). Or you might simply choose to. Some designers (we told you they’re a freespirited bunch) argue that Helvetica provides a “clean, modern look” to typeset copy and insist on its use. If you do use Helvetica or another sans-serif face, make it work best by setting it with:
• At least two points of line spacing
• A line length of 14 picas or less
• Ragged right line endings, as discussed below.
Body type: Bigger is better
You can do everything else right, but make your body type too small, and your publication will be doomed to failure. The size of your type can determine whether people will read your publication. Millions of people suffer from presbyopia, a form of farsightedness that occurs as the eye’s aging lens becomes less elastic. Today, more than 80 million have presbyopia.
There are also millions of Americans, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, who have trouble reading newspapers, even aided by glasses or contact lenses.
Even if they can see it, many people find reading small type a chore. Unless people have to read it (things like contracts, phone books, or college catalogs), most won’t.
Too-small type can even affect performance. Groups of Army recruits taking standardized vocational aptitude tests a few years ago began recording significantly lower average test scores even though the test questions were basically the same.
The cause? Printers had reduced the type size used in the test; the smaller point size took longer to read and candidates flunked the timed portion of the test. So, what size is best? A lot of typographic characteristics come into play. First, there is the font’s x-height. While typefaces with smaller x-heights “appear” smaller, size for size, they do allow more white space between lines than “larger” cousins.
Next week: The color of type
Tags: body type, Helvetica, line spacing, presbyopia, Professional Look, ragged right, sans serif, type, x-height
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