“The correctly set w o r d i s t h e

starting-point of all typography. The letters

themselves we have to accept — they are shaped by the type designer.”

-Jan Tschichold (1902–1974)

Display Type Alex W. White

There are two kinds of type: display and text. Text is where the story is. Display is there to describe content and lure the reader through a sequence of typographic

impressions so he can make an informed decision about committing to the first paragraph of text. At that point, the story is on its own and the designer’s job of revealing content is largely done.

Display type is not necessarily large: its intention is to be seen first. Its visibility is dependent on the surrounding type, so the focal point can be the element with the greatest contrast with its surroundings.

There are various opportunities for the designer to describe content and lure browsers. Primary type is usually a headline.

Secondary type, intended to be read after the headline and before the text, includes subheads and decks, captions, department headings, breakouts, and pull quotes.

Readers are accustomed to looking at big type fi rst, but

“display” is not necessarily large type. Nor is “text” necessarily small type. The real defi nitions are intentional: “display” is the type intended to stop the browser and to be read fi rst; “text” is the destination to which the reader fi nds self drawn.

Display type stops browsers as it describes the content. It

leads directly to secondary type.

Display type is not necessarily large: its intention is to be seen first. Its visibility

is dependent on the surrounding type, so the focal point can be the element

with the greatest contrast with its surroundings

Primary Type

Primary type is used to draw attention to itself, to stop the browser and to lead to a specific piece of secondary type. The secondary type’s

purpose, in turn, is to lead to the text. The text is always the final destination.

Headlines and the structure of a page create the personality of printed material.

Headline treatments fall into three categories: alignment and position, contrasting type styles, and the integration

of type and imagery. Regardless of design treatment, a great headline is provocatively written and makes an

immediate point.

Three headline

styles:

2. Contrasting typestyles: the headline is visible primarily by setting it in a different

typeface.

1. Contrast of alignment and position: the headline is visible primarily by separating if from the text.

3. Type and image integration: the headline is visible

primarily by blending the type and image into one

impression.

Typographic Abstraction

There are places where

playfulness with legibility

is inappropriate. Text, for

example, is simply too small

to absorb abstraction without

substantially losing legibility.

There are places where

playfulness with legibility

is inappropriate. Text, for

example, is simply too small

to absorb abstraction without

substantially losing legibility.

But display type is tailor-made

for unusual treatments that flirt with

illegibility. Display type is meant to attract

attention and it is usually big, so letterforms

can be read even if they are “damaged.”

There are an infinite number of ways

to harm letter and word forms

and they are all combinations

of the nine typographic

contrasts. Type

abstraction simply pushes a normal

contrast to an extreme.

Typographic abstraction can be accomplished in infinite ways. Abstraction exploits the nine type contrasts: color (dark/light), character

shape (serif/sans serif), character width (expanded/condensed), density (tight/loose,

positive/negative, solid/outline), format (caps/lowercase), position (vertical/horizontal, top/

bottom, front/back), size (small/large),

stress (vertical/oblique), weight (heavy/light).

Some typefaces are inherently abstract and hard to read. With

these, ordinary typesetting is all that’s needed to create an attention-getting abstracted

message.

Use typography that is laden with character sparingly, only in the primary and secondary

A typeface’s character

may be corroborative,

opposing, or neutral to the

meaning of its message.

type where its attention-getting strength is at least as important as its legibility.

Tops of letters are easier to read than bottoms. Lowercase are easier to read than caps because word shapes are varied.

Typographic expression and playfulness is best done with

relatively plain typefaces. Simple letterforms are

editable while keeping their essential shapes legible.

For this reason, sans serif faces are more useful than serif, and roman is more useful than italic.

Type

Secondary

If the headline

is the lure, the subhead is the

readers’ payoff. Here is the

opportunity to hook the reader

by explaining the headline. The

headline leads to one or more

secondary messages, first a subhead or

deck, but possibly a caption, breakout,

or pull quote.

The messages in the headline and subhead should be two parts of a complete thought, provocatively showing why the story is important to the reader.

Readers should,

after a total of three or four

information “hits,” have

been given enough

information about the

story to make an informed

decision about whether or not to get into the text. Actually becoming committed to the text can happen only after they have begun reading it.

Secondary type should be smaller — or less visible — than the headline, but more prominent than text.

A balance must be struck between contrasts and unity among the three levels of type. Variations of one typeface in the primary and

secondary type contrast well against a highly legible text face.

Selecting the right typeface is a significant decision, but how you use a typeface is at least as important as what typeface is used. Imagine if your work were given an award for design excellence: would the typeface designer get the credit or would you be recognized for having used

type well?

Subheads are secondary type that explain headlines. A deck is a subhead immediately beneath the headline. A floating subhead is placed away from the headline. A breaker head is placed in the text column and, while breaking copy into short chunks, hints at the worth- while goodies within.

Breakouts and pull quotes are brief extracts from the text that are handled like verbal illustrations. Provocatively edited, their purpose is to make browsers stop and consider reading the story. Breakouts and pull quotes can visually connect pages of a long story by interpreting the type treatment of the

opener’s headline.

Captions explain photos. Because they are read before the text, they must be thought of as display

type and written short.

A friend redesigned a magazine in the days of hot metal type, when a font was truly a single typeface in one size and weight. The foreign client had purchased only two fonts: 11-point Franklin Gothic Regular and Bold. The magazine could only use those two fonts, yet they had to do all that a magazine’s typography must do. The redesign, using position and

emptiness to make display type visible, succeeded because of — rather than in spite of — the extremely limited typographic contrast.

Use no more than two typeface families in a design, and do not use more than two weights of each face. Add italic versions of the regular weight and you have six typographic “voices,” which should be enough

to convey any message. This is equivalent to hearing six people reading aloud.

Kerning is the optical spacing of letterform pairs, which is more important than global

tracking at display sizes.

Setting Display Type

Small caps match the weight of full-size caps. False small caps, which are merely reduced in size, look too light because they are proportionally smaller.

Display type shows off misspaced characters more than text simply because of its larger size, where character-to-character relationships are particularly visible. Letters are strung together into words. The space between individual letters goes unnoticed when the type is smaller than about 18 points. The optimum letterspacing is “invisible,” that is, it is un-selfconscious. The reader should not be aware that letterspacing exists when it is done well.

Headlines are made of clusters of phrases and

should be “broken for sense” into these clusters, regardless of the shape this forces on the headline. To find the natural breaks, read a headline out loud. Try not to break a headline to follow a design; rather, break a headline so that it makes the most sense to the reader. Hyphenating type communicates that shape is more important than meaning. Display type should never be hyphenated, unless its

meaning is to illustrate “disconnection.”

Words are grouped into lines of type. Word spacing is the glue that holds lines of type together. The secret to good word spacing is

also invisibility. The reader should not be aware of the type that is being read but should be concentrating on its meaning.

Display word spacing is often too large because it is set with built-in text algorithms. In general, display

type’s global word spacing can be reduced to 50 to 80 percent of

normal.

The effectiveness of display typography is principally dependent on the management of the white space between and around the letterforms, not only on the letterforms themselves. Because display type is brief (to snag the reader’s attention), letterspacing, word spacing, and line breaks become more important.

Increase contrast and visibility of headlines by making them darker on the page. Reduce white

space in and around characters in letterspacing

and linespacing. All cap headlines in particular

should have linespacing removed because there are no descenders to “fill in” the space between lines.

In upper and lowercase settings, don’t let

ascenders and descenders touch, or they’ll create an

unintentional stigma on the page.

Display type is one element of a successful page. But the success of a page is only as good as the power with which it communicates and the effortlessness with which it does it.

“You cannot not communicate”.

Paul Watzlawick

(1922– )

Paul Watzlawick is author of Pragmatics of Human Communication, a book

about the influence of media on people’s behavior. “You

cannot not communi- cate” is known as Watzlawick’s First

Axiom of Communication.

Try to find your way around without type and you’ll be as lost as most of us would be in Japan, where there is plenty of type to read, but only for those who have learned to read the right sort of charac- ters.

Type is Everywhere

Erik Spiekerm

ann

& E

.M. G

inger

Have you ever been to Japan? A friend who went there recently reported that he had

never felt so lost in his life. Why? Because he could not read anything: not road signs,

not price tags, not instructions of any kind. It made him feel stupid, he said. It

also made him realize how much we all depend on written communication.

Picture yourself in a world without type. True, you could do without some of the ubiquitous advertising messages, but you wouldn’t even know what the packages on your breakfast table contained.

Sure enough, there are pictures on them — grazing cows on a paper carton suggest that milk is inside, and cereal packaging has appetizing images to make you hungry. But pick up salt or pepper, and what do you look for? S and P?

Breakfast for some people wouldn’t be the same without the morning paper. And here it is again: inevitable type. Most people call it “print” and don’t pay too much attention to typographic subtleties. You’ve probably never compared the small text typefaces in different newspapers, but you do know that some newspapers are easier to read than others. It might be because they have larger type, better pictures, and lots of headings to guide you through the stories. Regardless, all these differences are conveyed by type. In fact, a newspaper gets its look, its personality, from the typefaces used and the ways in which they are arranged on the page. We easily recognize our favorite newspa- pers on the newsstand, even if we only see the edge of a page, just as we recognize our friends by seeing only their hands or their hair. And just as people look different across the world, so do the newspapers in different countries. What looks totally unacceptable to a North American reader will please the French reader at breakfast, while an Italian might find a German daily paper too monotonous.

What appears frightfully complex and incomprehensible to people who can only read the Latin alphabet, Chinese and Arabic brings news to the majority of the world’s population. They are spoken by more than half of the people on this planet.

Type says much more about a newspaper than

just the words it spells.

Some of the accents, special signs, and characters seen in languages other than English, give each language its unique appearance.

This book is designed within its own constraints. Each page is laid out

according to an underlying structure of some intricacy.

Of course, it’s not only type or layout that distinguishes newspapers, it is also the combination of words. Some languages have lots of accents, like French; some have very long words, like Dutch or Finnish; and some use extremely short ones, as in a British tabloid. Not every typeface is suited for every language, which also explains why certain type styles are popular in certain countries but not necessarily anywhere else.

This book is designed within its own constraints. Each page is laid out according

to an underlying structure of some intricacy.

This brings us back to type and newspapers. What might look quite obvious and normal to you when you read your daily paper is the result of careful planning and applied craft. Even newspapers with pages that look messy are laid out following complex grids and strict hierarchies.More and more people

read the news not on paper, but on TV screens or computer monitors. Type and layout have to be reconsidered for these applications.

The artistry comes in offering the information in such a way that the reader doesn’t get sidetracked into thinking about the fact that someone had to

carefully prepare every line, paragraph, and column into structured pages. Design — in this case at least — has to be invisible. Typefaces used for these hardworking tasks are therefore by definition “invisible.” They have to look so normal that you don’t even notice you’re reading them. And this is exactly why designing type is such an obscure profession; who thinks about people who produce invisible things? Nevertheless, every walk of life is defined by, expressed with and, indeed dependent on type and typography.

If you think that the choice of a typeface is something of little importance because nobody would know the difference anyway, you’ll be surprised to hear that experts spend an enormous amount of time and effort perfecting details that

are unseen by the untrained eye.

It is a bit like having been to a concert, thoroughly enjoying it, then reading in the paper the next morning that the conductor had been incompetent, the orchestra out of tune, and the piece of music not worth performing in the first place. While you had a great night out, some experts were unhappy with the performance because their standards and expectations were different than yours.

Food and design: how often do we buy the typographic promise

without knowing much about the product?

Stereotypes abound — some colors suggest

certain foods, particular typefaces suggest

different flavors and qualities. Without these

unwritten rules we wouldn’t know what to

buy or order.

The same thing happens when you have a glass of wine. While you might be perfectly happy with whatever you’re drinking, someone at the table will make a face and go on at length about why this

particular bottle is too warm, how that year wasn’t very good, and that he just happens to have a case full of some amazing

stuff at home that the uncle of a friend imports directly from France.

Does that make you a fool or does it simply say that there are varying levels of quality and satisfaction in everything we do?

While it may be fun to look at wine labels, chocolate boxes, or candy bars in order to stimulate one’s appetite for food or fonts (depending on your preference), most of us definitely do not enjoy an equally prevalent kind of communication: forms.

If you think about it, you’ll have to admit that business forms process a lot of information that would be terribly

boring to have to write afresh every time. All you do is check a box, sign your name, and you get what you ask for.

Unless, of course, you’re filling out your tax return, when they get what they ask for; or unless the form is so poorly written, designed, or printed (or all of the above) that you have a hard time understanding it. Given the typographic

choices available, there is no excuse for producing bad business forms, illegible invoices, awkward applications,

ridiculous receipts, or bewildering ballots. Not a day goes by without one’s having to cope with printed matter of this nature. It

could so easily be a more pleasant experience.

The “generic” look of most business forms usually derives from technical constraints. But even when those

restrictions no longer exist, the look lingers on, often confirming our prejudice against this sort of standardized communication.

While onscreen forms offer a very reduced palette of typographic choices, they at least provide some automatic features to help with drudgery of repeatedly typing your credit card number.

Every PC user today knows what a font is, calls at least some of them by their first name (e.g., Helvetica, Verdana, and Times) and appreciates that typefaces convey different emotions. Although what we see on screen are actually little unconnected square dots that trick our eyes into recognizing pleasant shapes, we now expect all type to look like “print.”

While there is a tendency to overdesign everything and push technology to do things it was never intended to do, like printing onto raw eggs, at least we can continue our

typographic training even when deciding whether the food we bought is nourishing or not.

Some of the most pervasive typographical messages have

never really been designed, and neither have the typefaces they are set in. Some engineer,

administrator, or accountant in some government department

had to decide what the signs on our roads and freeways should look like. This person probably

formed a committee made up of other engineers, administrators,

and accountants who in turn went to a panel of experts that would

have included manufacturers of signs, road safety experts,

lobbyists from automobile associations, plus more engineers, administrators, and accountants.

Signage systems have

to fulfill complex demands.

In the past this issue has been largely

neglected, partly because it would have

been almost impossible to implement and partly because

designers chose to ignore these problems, leaving them up to

other people who simply weren’t aware that special typefaces could

help improve the situation.

Some of the most pervasive typographical messages have never really been designed, and neither have the typefaces they are set in. Some engineer, administrator, or accountant in some government department had to decide what the signs on our roads and freeways should look like. This person probably formed a committee made up of other engineers, administrators, and accountants who in turn went to a panel of experts that would have included manufacturers of signs, road safety experts, lobbyists from automobile associations, plus more engineers, administrators, and accountants.

You can bet there wasn’t one typographer or graphic designer in the group, so the outcome shows no

indication of any thought toward legibility, let alone communication or

beauty. Nevertheless we’re stuck with

our road signs. They dominate our open

spaces, forming a large part of a country’s visual

culture.

Typefaces have now been designed with a series of closely related weights to offer precisely the right one. There are no more excuses for badly designed signs, whether on our roads or inside our buildings.

The letterforms on these signs were constructed from simple geometric patterns rather than from written or drawn letterforms because they had to be re-created by sign- makers all over the country. It seems our official alphabets are here to stay, even though it would be possible to use other typefaces more suitable for the task.