News Design School » Typography

Ah, letterpress. Paper. Ink.

Bob — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 15:08:30 +0000

I love old printing. I guess because I, in fact, am now old. Long gone are my days in a composing room, reading lead type upside down and backwards. Sigh.

Here is a brief vid about letterpress printing in one of the few shops in the UK still pressing ink on paper.

Upside Down, Left To Right: A Letterpress Film from Danny Cooke on Vimeo.

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Attention to details with type pays off

Bob — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 14:54:10 +0000

I love type. When I was younger and wanted to be an artist when I grew up, I used to paint letterforms. That’s probably why I am not an artist.

But I still appreciate good typography, and I groan when I see bad typography. Here’s an example of the latter:

The Ts in “matters” are touching, creating the symbol for pi, instead of the shapes we are familiar with. Individual letters should not touch. This is all too common. At least negative linespacing is used, a must with all-CAPS.

Take the time to adjust your display type at least: the headlines, column logos, flags, etc. In InDesign and/or Quark, it is not all that hard and it should take only 60 seconds or so.

Attention to details like this will keep readers and keep readers happy.

If you would like a video critique of your pages, please let me know. Use the Contact page to shoot mean e-mail.

Newspaper typography: Comic Sans can help

Bob — Mon, 10 Jan 2011 15:23:26 +0000

It has long been held among those involved in newspaper typography and design that the best typefaces, especially for body type, are those that are easy to read. Much work has been put in to the development and design of “readability” typefaces.

But an article in the journal Cognition (as reported by the Wall Street Journal) shares evidence that that approach might be wrong-thinking.

In the two-pronged study, the researchers found that information presented in odd typefaces was remembered better when it was in, for instance, Monotype Corsiva, Bodoni MT or even Comic Sans italics!

On tests, the group that read information in the “odder” typefaces did a better job than the group that studied handouts usual a standard typeface, such as Arial.

Assuming your want your stories to be memorable, you might want to give up on the Nimrod.

Handy dingbat fonts for newspaper design

Bob — Fri, 10 Dec 2010 20:27:29 +0000

I love dingbat fonts as a replacement for clip art. So much of the free clip art — heck, even the paid clip art — available on the web is tacky. At best. One can actually find some great stuff in dingbat fonts.

They are highly scalable, easy to keep track of (hey, they are fonts), and have many uses. A good listing of some of the best can be found here. I love the ink splots and the butterflies.

I discussed how to use them for clip art and how to colorize them in a past post.

Enjoy!

Newspaper headlines: serif or sans?

Bob — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 17:37:32 +0000

Earlier this week I ran a poll here to discover which type group was more favored for newspaper headlines. The results?

Serif: 57%
Sans serif: 29%
Other: 14%

You know you are a designer if the thought of playing around with different typefaces makes you lick your lips with anticipation. Me? As a newspaper designer, I particularly love headline typefaces, and the Choosing of the Heads is the most fun I have while leading a redesign.

I mean, what’s not to like? First, the big serif vs. sans serif debate, with loads of wonderful faces to choose from. That choice probably depends somewhat on the publisher’s personal taste (hey, she’s writing the check) and the personality of the newspaper in its own competitive marketplace.

Once you settle on the basic group, the fun begins.

Even though I prefer serif faces to sans serif on print editions, and vice versa on news web sites, it doesn’t really matter. Once you settle on the basic group, the fun begins. Now you get to play with various typeface options, you can fiddle with size and linespacing to best match the baseline grid you set up, and you get to adjust set width and tracking.

Before I go any further into my Happy Space, I need to say how important it is to settle on your body type before you select your heads.

This is because your body type takes up the majority of the newshole and it is, in essence, long, vertical columns of a shade of gray, depending on the face and your settings. Some typefaces give a rather light gray to the body type and some a darker gray. You need to take this “type color” into consideration when selecting your headlines so you have the appropriate contrast between the two.

A light body type calls for a medium weight: you want your heads to carry more visual weight than your body copy, but you don’t want to overwhelm it. If you have a medium-dark gray body type, you are going to have to go a little stronger on your headline typeface.

Serif faces, to my eye, tend to have more evocative personalities than do sans serif faces, which can often me strong, but bland and uninteresting. It’s probably because of the serifs and the contrast between thick and thin that is usually found lacking in sans serif faces.

Of course, the obvious solution to the dilemma is to use both. Use a bold sans serif for your hard-hitting lead news story and a serif for the other stories on your section fronts. I would do this mainly on section fronts, by the way, not inside.

Once you have made your choice, I would almost guarantee that you will improve the heads by setting a negative tracking number, thus tightening the head a bit. I also recommend that you condense the typeface a bit as well, not to make it a condensed face, but just to make the presentation a little more dense. Use a condensed face that was drawn that way if that’s the look you need.

That’s it. Now, you’ve given the copyeditors the notes, it’s up to them to make the headlines sing.