dot-font: A Few Preconceived Notions about Type

John D. Berry

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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.

There are always a few received ideas that get in the way of working effectively, in typography as in everything else. These assumptions are especially prevalent in everyday business communications, though they crop up often enough in the studios of supposedly high-end design, too. Here are a few mistaken ideas about type that need to be put to rest.

“Can’t We Just Use Arial?”

There are times when it makes sense to stick to the tiny set of fonts that you know will be found on almost everyone’s machine: the “Base 14” of Times, Helvetica, Courier, and Zapf Dingbats, or Microsoft’s preferred and ubiquitous replacement for Helvetica, Arial. But we don’t speak Base-14, and there’s no reason our typographic communications should, either.

I’m not an especial friend of Helvetica, a much-overused typeface with letters—and notably numbers—that are all too easy to confuse with each other, and despite the opprobrium that’s been hurled on the upstart Arial, there are some details of Arial that I actually prefer to Helvetica. But neither of them is a particularly good typeface for extended text, unless they’re handled with extreme care by a talented typographer; putting them in the hands of everyday font users is like handing them crayons and asking them to write a business letter. The fact that Arial and Helvetica, like Times and Courier, can be reasonably expected to be on everyone’s computer doesn’t make them the best typefaces to use.

The reason for specifying a particular typeface, in print or on screen, is to achieve a certain effect. The exact shape of those letters, arranged in exactly that way, give form to the message, and that form is an integral part of how the message is conveyed and received. That’s why designers become designers: not to decorate pages, but to make them communicate better. The effect on the reader, even if it’s completely unconscious, is what counts.

If you create and distribute a document using only the fonts that reside on everyone’s machine, you’re not creating an effect; you’re creating a malleable piece of raw material, something that whoever is at the other end can use to create their effect. But if they are the target, your audience, then it’s the effect on them that matters. You want to use something that will stand out, that will make your point clearly and authoritatively—not something that just looks like all the rest of the business mush that comes across their desk.

“Capital Letters Are Better”

Capital letters look more formal to us than lowercase letters, which is why we often use caps in titles. But lowercase letters are more varied in their forms and shapes, which make them easier to distinguish from each other; and that, in turn, makes them easier and faster to read than capitals.

Sometimes you’ll see emergency signs spelled out all in capital letters. The idea is to make a big splash—to get your attention and look official and important. But those all-caps signs are not necessarily as easy to read in a hurry as ones that use mostly lowercase. A line of all-caps needs to be letter spaced slightly to be readable (which most signs are not), and even then the inherent regularity of caps provides less information to the person deciphering the message.

Initial caps can also get in the way, though they do vary the shapes of the words. It’s a very common style in newspaper headlines (at least in this country) to capitalize the first letter of each word or each major word. (It’s also the house style here at Creativepro.) This may look somehow more dignified, but the fact is that it slows down reading and comprehension. Basically, the fewer capital letters you use, the easier it is to read. Don’t capitalize anything you don’t have to.

“Just Fill Up the Page”

That’s the wrong way to communicate. The standard 8 1/2 x 11 page in the United States (or the slightly different A4 size in much of the rest of the world) is not proportioned for typesetting by computer; it became a standard because it worked for business letters. But those letters were typed on manual typewriters, which typically used a 10-pitch or 12-pitch fixed-width typeface (that is, 10 or 12 characters to the inch, all of them exactly the same width).

Modern office equipment is the computer and a laser or inkjet printer, using those old default fonts, Times and Helvetica (or Arial). Most correspondence is done in Times; so are most reports and spec sheets and manuals and memos. But Times, like all typefaces except those derived from typewriters, is a proportional font, so it tends to fit a lot more letters per inch than the equivalent size of a fixed-width font like Courier; and the default size of 10 point (or even 12 point) is a lot smaller in Times than that old typewriter face. (There’s no relation between “pitch” and “point,” so don’t be confused by the similar numbers.)

The result is that if you set up your page with the same margins you might have used for a typewritten letter (say, an inch on either side, and about the same at top and bottom), you’ll find that you have a lot more words on each line when you use 10-point Times. Too many words. A really long line of type is harder to read than one that’s a reasonable length—or rather, when combined in a block of prose with other lines of the same length, the long lines get hard to read. (That’s why book editors, who have to read piles of unsolicited manuscripts, insist on getting them delivered in 12-point Courier printed double-spaced with inch-and-a-half margins. It’s not that it’s beautiful, but that it’s readable, and it leaves enough room for copyediting marks if the manuscript makes it that far into the publishing process.)

Basically, to get the same easy readability on a typeset page (and what we produce from a computer is a typeset page, though we may not think of it that way) as you might have gotten with a Selectric on a typewritten page, you have to either make the point size a lot larger (which may look odd), or set it in two columns. Luckily for us, even most word processors make it easy to set a page in two columns today.

A personal letter or a business letter might look funny in two columns, so the solution there is to stick with one column and simply make one of the margins really big. This isn’t an affectation; it keeps the actual lines of the letter short enough to be readable.

The rule of thumb, in English at least, is that about 10 to 12 words per line is a comfortable length for reading. This is based on an average word of five letters, plus one word space, so it means about 60 to 70 characters per line. (Character count is much more accurate than word count. And it’s also important how those characters are arranged. As any book editor or designer could tell you, a 50,000-word manuscript that’s all short lines of dialog takes up a lot more pages than one that’s all long paragraphs of dense prose.) This “rule” varies depending on the typeface and the spacing and all the tiny factors of typographic design, but it’s a good starting place.

“English Doesn’t Need Accents”

Wrong. This is a nice comforting notion if you’re trying to limit yourself to what’s on the key caps of an American keyboard. The English language doesn’t require diacritical marks for most words, but that’s not the same as saying that it doesn’t require them for any words. Some of our words with accents have come from another language, especially French, but if you drop the accents you may create confusion or nonsense in English.

A good example that we’re all familiar with is the word “résumé.” To an English-speaker, it doesn’t much matter whether the first accent is there or not (it won’t affect how we pronounce the letter, although to a French-speaker it’s an essential clue to pronunciation), but without the second accent, how can we tell whether the word is three syllables (“REZZ-uh-may”) or two (“rih-ZOOM”)? Our verb “resume” (“Please resume normal speed”) is quite different in meaning, pronunciation, and use from our noun “résumé” (“Please send your résumé in text format”). Sure, you can probably tell from context which word is meant, but why create confusion, and force someone to read the sentence twice? That’s not good communication. Keep the accent.

“Nobody Will Notice”

All of typographic design is about having an effect on the reader or viewer. It may be only typographers who go to a restaurant and find themselves criticizing the type on the menu, but every reader absorbs the effect—unconsciously. That effect is made up of lots of tiny details that nobody is aware of, but that together form the whole.

I once worked in a typesetting shop (in the days of phototypesetting) where the owner knew a lot about type and printing but sometimes took a cavalier attitude toward the everyday customers. “They spec’d Helvetica, but give them Univers,” he’d sometimes say, when all the Helvetica fonts were in use on another job. “They won’t know the difference.” He was often quite right (he knew his customers, many of whom produced newsletters or tabloid newspapers with a minimum of attention to detail), but nonetheless even that subtle difference would have its effect on how the page looked to the reader. (At other times, the same owner could become quite finicky about typographic details. It depended on the customer.)

The point to remember is that all the details contribute to the overall effect.

“Not a Big Deal”

I could go on, and I’m sure you could too. It’s always easy to poke holes in received wisdom (and it’s fun!), but my point is simply to help ease our communication by suggesting a few useful hints about how to use type. I’d certainly be glad to hear about your pet “preconceived notions,” too.