Typography today

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, May, 1989 by John Peter

Typography today

Today, the game in magazine-making is readership. Readership relies principally on content; content relies principally on words; and words rely on readability. Although other visual elements--photographs, illustrations, graphs and graphics--play an important role, print's principal visual communication vehicle is typography.

Legibility vs. readability

Basic is the distinction between legibility and readability. Legibility is what makes it possible to distinguish one character from another. Readability is what makes it possible to recognize them as words. I have spent a good deal of time over the years tracking down the studies purporting to assess the readability of various typefaces, and I have found none that could stand up to the scrutiny of modern scientific methodology. Most deal with out-of-date fonts, usually book text and measures in limited sampling.

Perhaps the most frequently asked question about typography is the one concerning the readability of serif versus sans serif faces. Conventional wisdom is that as children we learn to read with a serif face, and therefore they are easier for us to read. Ed Benguiat, the talented typographer and type designer with New York's Photolettering Inc., has this observation: "When little Billy and Mary went to school, they learned how to print with a pen or pencil. They printed sans serif. Then, when the first reader came, it was not in sans serif. It was in a Century or a serif face. The 'a' that Billy and Mary made with a circle and line now became something thick and thin with a bunch of little giddys on it. The reason Billy can't read is you are not teaching him with the same letter he learned how to write."

Type pro Allen Haley, executive vice president of International Typographic Company, believes, "You can make a sans serif very readable, but you can't just plug it into a system and run it. If you think about it, the only thing a serif does for you in reading is keep your eye from falling through the cracks in a line. But if you do a good job of letter spacing and word spacing a line, the eyes are not going to do that anyway."

Haley adds, "One of the problems of sans serif type is not the lack of serifs, but that they tend to be monotone design. The eye needs a certain amount of sparkle on a page to keep its interest. Perhaps types that have a thick and thin contrast tend to be easier to read. So all things being equal, I guess you would say serif faces are somewhat more readable."

The italic in sans serif faces is the roman made oblique, whereas in serif faces the italic is a quite different design. This monotone quality is particularly observable with an italicized sans word in a block of text.

All this applies to type in large amounts. In small amounts--for example, titles, subtitles and captions, and in reverse, in color and in countless other circumstances--these observations do not apply.

It is also true that uppercase and lowercase type is easier to read than all caps. A full page of all caps text makes tough reading, but in small amounts it reads well. In magazine or newspaper design, it is my tendency to put almost everything in upper-and lowercase except those elements, such as labels, that are intended to be seen but not read. It's perhaps because of my background as a writer that I want to give the golden words the very best chance to be read.

One of the fruits of the new technology is the unprecedented variety of available typefaces. Earlier manufacturers of typesetting equipment were machinery manufacturers. Their interest was in making machines. Typeface dies that took a good bit of time and money to produce were regarded somewhat as necessary ancillaries. With the advent of phototypesetting, versatile electronic equipment replaced heavy machinery. Both the cost and profitability of typefaces were significantly altered. This both permitted and encouraged the design of a number of new typefaces, as well as the updating of many traditional fonts.

Type pros respond to the question, "Why so many new faces?" with a musical analogy: "For the same reason there are new songs." Says George Sohn, president of Photolettering, Inc., "People are always looking for new music, always looking for a new and different expression."

"This is true of any art form," adds Haley, "and type design is an art form."

This wide variety is particularly useful in advertising and promotional material that seeks to provide special identity to products. But if one views a publication as a product, the same is true in publication design.

I, like many others, favor limited typefaces in a magazine to reinforce the magazine's identity and separate it from its competitors. This applies less to publications with large editorial wells, perhaps, but in the high ad:edit mix of most magazines, there is an advantage to signaling each editorial page with a recognizable type dress. The need for variety and typographic change of pace has been met to a certain extent by the increased number of weights in a single typeface. Several have as many as 16 options, including italic, although six or eight will more likely be the range for the future. Given the number of new faces, the talent, quality and care with which the majority have been produced is remarkable.