dot-font: Kerning Chads

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dot-font was a collection of short articles written by editor and typographer John D. Barry (the former editor and publisher of the typographic journal U&lc) for CreativePro.  If you’d like to read more from this series, click here.

Eventually, John gathered a selection of these articles into two books, dot-font: Talking About Design and dot-font: Talking About Fonts, which are available free to download here.  You can find more from John at his website, https://johndberry.com.

If good typography is about communication, and poor typography gets in the way of communication, what happens when the typography in something as real-world as a voters’ pamphlet is poorly done?

Trying to Read the Fine Print

Lots of United States cities, counties, and states publish voters’ pamphlets when an election is in the offing—thick publications on newsprint that explain who the candidates are and what the propositions and initiatives and other issues will be. It’s probably safe to say that most voters don’t read these pamphlets very closely, if at all. But in low-profile races, like those for judgeships (in states where judges are elected) or county assessors or school-board members (at least when the voters aren’t parents of school-age children), people who are curious enough or dutiful enough to actually want to find out about the candidates and the issues do look at what’s printed in the voters’ pamphlets. How much difference does it make whether the text is easy or difficult to read?

In all the voters’ pamphlets I’ve seen, the text is unedited. It’s printed exactly as the candidates or backers submitted it—so clarity and good writing have a chance to make a good impression, and the electoral system gives fuzzy thinkers and inarticulate writers enough rope to hang themselves in public. When the issue isn’t a candidate but a complicated matter of local law, with statements and counter-statements and misleading double-negatives and perhaps an official explanation of exactly what will change in the wording of the statute in question, there may be an awful lot of fine print to plow through.

A typographer can make the fine print easy to read, or the sort of thing that makes your eyes glaze over and your attention wander. There’s a reason why contracts that nobody wants you to read are typeset in 8pt Times Bold in 45-pica lines with almost no leading—and maybe in all-caps, to boot. Electoral documents aren’t likely to be as outrageous as that; I’ve even seen legal requirements that the type has to be at least a certain point size. But nobody sets a requirement about how well that type has to be set.

The Devil’s in the Details

Does this sound like trivia? It is, but the manipulation of that trivia can actually have an effect on an election. It can have an effect whether it’s manipulated on purpose (to disguise something and slip it by the voters) or simply through sloppiness and lack of attention to detail. All those fine points of typography that can make text readable and inviting can also make it unreadable and uninviting.

I wish I still had the Washington State voters’ pamphlet from a few years ago that first got me thinking about this question. While I’m sure there was no nefarious plot behind it, I noticed that the fine print of some of the initiatives before the voters was set with much tighter tracking than the fine print of some of the others. The effect was to make that text harder to read, because the letters were all squeezed too tightly together.

What I do have is two voters’ pamphlets from the California primary election coming up on March 5: one from the State of California, and one from the City and County of San Francisco.

In the San Francisco pamphlet, most of the text is set in either Helvetica or Times Roman, the default fonts of the western world. The candidates’ statements are set in Helvetica in a two-column format that works reasonably well (except for an apparent phobia about hyphens, which leads to some very large gaps between words every now and then), but some of the more general information is set in 10pt or 11pt Helvetica in lines so long that they span the entire width of the letter-size page, and there are boxed notices that have been tracked so tight that nobody could be expected to read them with comprehension (see figure 1).

Figure 1

In the back of the pamphlet, where the texts of proposed changes in the laws are given, they appear in Times Roman at a small size in three justified columns (see figure 2). Although it’s clearly “the fine print,” it’s not that hard to read—except, again, for the lack of hyphenation. “A” for effort, but execution could be better.

Figure 2

In the California pamphlet, there are no obvious typesetting errors, but there is a very peculiar combination of typefaces (see figure 3). The subheads, which include the candidates’ names, are set in a generously spaced sans serif face (Scala Sans, I believe) in semibold caps and small caps; these work remarkably well. But all of the text of the pamphlet is set is Goudy Old Style.

Figure 3

Goudy Old Style is a typeface that we’re all used to, so it has the virtue of familiarity. But it’s a busy, idiosyncratic face (like most of Frederic Goudy’s), and in its photo and digital forms, it’s a spindly one too. It became anemic in the transition from letterpress to offset printing. It’s got thin, almost vine-like letterforms that appear to grow together if you let them; even when they’re not set too closely, I often have the urge to take pruning shears to the typeface. And this effect is doubled when it comes to the italic.

In the California voters’ pamphlet, most of the Goudy Old Style text is set with little or no leading, which makes it hard to read. The tracking in most places is a little tight (though not extraordinarily so), and the line length of the candidates’ statements is just a little too long to read comfortably—especially with that lack of leading. But the amazing thing is the text of proposed laws in the back of the book, which is set entirely in italic (see figure 4). Goudy Old Style has a decorative italic that looks lovely in small doses, but it’s a disaster in long blocks of text; I can’t imagine anyone but the most persistent and keen-eyed lawyer plowing through these endless patches of dense, spiky undergrowth. (Did I mention the straight quotes and the fake small caps? Maybe I was a bit hasty in saying there were “no obvious typesetting errors.”) And of course no one thought to use old-style figures for the recurring blocks of numerals such as seven-digit subsection numbers and large sums of money.

Figure 4

Skip the Small Stuff?

There’s no smoking gun here. It’s all small stuff: details. But if we hire skilled designers to pay minute attention to the details of our telephone books (and we do), perhaps we should be doing the same when it comes to the essential tools of our electoral system. It’s not just the design of the ballot that counts.

John D. Berry is a typographer, book designer, design writer, editor, and typographic consultant. He is a former President of ATypI, and he is the founder and director of the Scripta Typographic Institute.
  • SandeeCohen says:

    The comment “no one thought to use old-style figures” is being far too kind to the people who laid out the brochure.

    I would bet 500 megs of RAM that the people who laid out the copy don’t know what old-style figures are nor where they can be obtained.

    It does no good for programs such as InDesign to support typographic nuances when there is an entire generation of designers who have never seen old-style figures.

    Think about it. Desktop publish has been used in mass media for about 16 years. That means children who were 10 years old are now 26 year-old art directors and designers. They went through all of high school and college design classes most liekly never learning about to open an “Expert” font set to get to the old-style figures.

    Same thing for proper small caps, swashes, fractions, etc.

    As much as I like the typographic nuances in ID, I worry that it is too late for most people to know what to do with them.

  • anonymous says:

    Since many of these same towns and cities have to fund all of these materials themselves, who’s going to justify spending extra money to make materials that most people won’t read anyway more legible?

    Think about it — there were locations in Florida that were still using 30 year-old voting booths in the last election.

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