Liven up any document - being creative with type

Home Office Computing, Jan, 1995 by John Moore, Larry Miller

ALL OF US WORK WITH TYPE TO SOME DEGREE, AND everyone has his or her own ideas about what looks good. So what's so difficult about working with different fonts when designing your documents?

Dynamic use of display type can make a big difference when you're trying to grab someone's attention. With the right technique, your choice of typography can liven up your ads, brochures, fliers, or newsletters. But if you're not familiar with design basics, you'll find that getting the right look for your documents is a lot harder than you thought. A few basic rules of thumb, however, can put you on the right track to spicing up your documents.

First of all, look at your work and ask yourself if your target audience will find it easy to read. After all, who knows your market better than you? If you're creating a document tor senior citizens, for example, make sure the font is large. When designing a menu, consider whether it will be read in dim light. You can, by the way, make better judgments from a printout than from what you see onscreen.

You should also determine if the display type you're using is suitable for your business. For example, if you're creating a brochure or an ad promoting legal services, you should ask yourself if the type is too decorative for the serious, conservative look you want to project. You should go with your instincts--but if it doesn't feel right, try another approach.

The Long and Winding Road Your options when working with display type are endless, so it helps to narrow your focus a bit. You may, for instance, want to consider the classic, straightforward look. Take one font--usually one of the typefaces that comes with your computer--one size, and one weight. Century Schoolbook, which comes with most computers, personifies plain talk and is appropriate for text that requires directness--something you'd see on a flier, for instance. The classic approach will almost always give you a common-sense solution that fits any business environment.

If you want to be a little more adventurous, you can try what we call the contemporary approach, with which you create highly designed layouts. Contemporary design often features several fonts in one type unit (a headline, for instance), along with accents such as dotted lines, arrows, ovals, and type set inside a shape. The illustration accompanying this article is a good example of contemporary design, featuring three-dimensional effects and text stretched to fit in an irregularly shaped object. Adding a hip edge to your design can provide stunning results, but you have to be careful. It's easy to go overboard and end up with an unreadable mess of text.

So what situation is appropriate for the look you want? The classic version works best when your sole purpose is to convey information. Headlines or large type in one typeface, one weight, and one size may look boring, but it won't offend anyone. In this case, you should concentrate on spacing and breaking a unit of type so it looks strong and eye-catching. A related guideline for text (such as long copy for ads or brochures) is to use one type family throughout the document--while employing boldface type for subheads and italics for photo captions.

If you really want to grab someone's attention, however, and if the audience you're trying to reach isn't too conservative, try combining different fonts in your documents. The guideline to follow here is to mix contrasting fonts, meaning a serif and a sans serif font as opposed to two serifs or two sans serif fonts.

Tools for Type It's one thing to have lots of great ideas, but you also need tools to help you put those ideas to work. If you have the urge to use type creatively, you may want to add special effects to an individual character, curve an entire line of type, or modify the whole alphabet. Two popular illustration programs on both the Windows and Mac platforms--Macromedia's FreeHand and Adobe's Illustrator--allow you to easily modify one character at a time, so you can add outlines and blends, perspective, or just about anything you want. They (as well as some word processing programs such as WordPerfect) also offer an array of typographic effects, such as text along an irregular path, which lets the words walk along a complex curve. The CD-ROM version of CorelDraw (Windows only) offers siwmilar capabilities and includes 825 typefaces.

For special effects to enliven an individual character, word, or group of words, consider Adobe's TypeTwister with its many stylizations. Best of all, you can master the program in no time. Letraset's LetraStudio also offers a gallery of special effects, but its learning curve is steeper than TypeTwister's. Finally, if you've become a typophile and want to modify existing typefaces as well as create your own, Altsys's Fontographer and Ares's FontMonger will do the job. These programs won't make your design decisions for you, but they will allow you to experiment with different methods.

PostScript or TrueType? One thing to consider when designing your business documents is which font format to use. The two most popular are PostScript and TrueType. Both have extensive libraries, so that's not a primary concern when it comes to choosing. What you need to know, however, is which format your printer supports. Most Windows-compatible printers support both, but then there's the matter of downloading fonts to your printer when it's time to output your work. Font management software, such as Ares's FontMonger and Bitstream's TrueType Font Pack, will download either PostScript or TrueType fonts to your printer's memory, so there aren't any surprises when you try to print.