Book Typography 101 at the End of This Session, Participants Should Be Able To: 1

Home , Hanging punctuation, Leading, Pagination

3/21/2016

Objectives Book Typography 101 At the end of this session, participants should be able to: 1. Evaluate typeset pages for adherence Dick Margulis to traditional standards of good composition 2. Make sensible design recommendations to clients based on readability of text and clarity of communication

What is typography?

Typography encompasses • The design and layout of the printed or virtual page • The selection of fonts • The specification of typesetting variables • The actual composition of text

What is typography? What is typography?

The goal of good typography is to allow Typography that intrudes its own cleverness the unencumbered communication and interferes with the dialogue of the author’s meaning to the reader. between author and reader is almost always inappropriate.

Assigned reading: “The Crystal Goblet,” by Beatrice Ward http://www.arts.ucsb.edu/faculty/reese/classes/artistsbooks/Beatrice%20Warde,%20The%20Crystal%20Goblet.pdf (or just google it)

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How we read The basics

• Saccades • Page size and margins The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. Mary had a little lamb, a little bread, a little jam. • Line length and leading • Boules • Justification My very educated mother just served us nine. • Typeface My very educated mother just served us nine.

Page size and margins Line length

• Standard book sizes (or not) • Count the characters in three full lines • Kind of binding (including spaces) and divide by three • Portrait or landscape • A bit about paper • Default margins? • Top and bottom • Front and gutter

Line length Line length

• 45–55: okay for ragged right • 55–65: ideal for justified type

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Line length Leading [ledding]

• 65–75: permissible if necessary • Default leading is 20% (e.g., 10/12)

Leading [ledding] Leading [ledding]

• Let’s see what happens when we increase it to • 60% 40%

Leading [ledding] Justification

• 100% Flush right (ragged left) Flush left (ragged right)

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Justification Justification

Flush left (ragged right) Flush right (ragged left) • Centered

Justification Justification

• How ragged? Hyphenated? • Justified (and is the last line left, center, right, or forced?)

Justification Choosing appropriate faces

• Hanging punctuation (optical margins) • Text vs. display • Serif vs. sans serif • Chronistic vs. anachronistic • Oldstyle, transitional, modern • Continental, English, American

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Choosing appropriate fonts The basics

• Unicode • Page size and margins • Pro • Line length and leading • Intended for print • Justification • Cross‐platform • Typeface Put them all together and out pops the • Point size

Commercial standards

• Page depth – Facing pages balance (±) – No widows – No orphans (usually) – Spread can run one line (or maybe two) short or long – Successive spreads cannot differ by more than one line

Commercial standards Commercial standards

• Paragraph • Paragraph – No pigeonholes – No tight lines – No rivers – No loose lines – No ladders (hyphen or word ladders) – No letterspacing – No runts – No distortion – Don’t indent lede grafs – Don’t indent spaced grafs

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Commercial standards

• Punctuation and spelling – Follow the convention for quotation marks (AmE or BrE, as the case may be) – Acknowledgments (AmE) Acknowledgements (BrE) – Foreword, not forward, not foreward, not forword – The dictionary is your friend

Commercial standards Commercial standards

• The details • The details – Use typographers’ quotes and apostrophes – Use typographers’ quotes and apostrophes – Use ligatures

Commercial standards Commercial standards

• The details • The details – Use typographers’ quotes and apostrophes – Use typographers’ quotes and apostrophes – Use ligatures – Use ligatures – Choose optical spacing in most cases – Choose optical spacing in most cases – Choose optical margins in most cases – Choose optical margins in most cases – Use true small caps – Use true small caps – Choose the right numeral set

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Commercial standards What to look for

• The details • Pagination – Use typographers’ quotes and apostrophes • Folios and running heads – Use ligatures • Copyright page – Choose optical spacing in most cases • Page balance – Choose optical margins in most cases • Consistent treatment of heds (capitalization, – Use true small caps spacing) – Choose the right numeral set • – Use en dashes and em dashes correctly Consistent treatment of images, captions, credits – Use real ellipses (. . .), not dot leaders (…)

What to look for What to look for

• Consistent treatment of tables and equations • RIP issues • All figure and table callouts • Image issues • Justification, indents, widows, orphans, runts • Bleeds • Ladders, rivers, pigeonholes, bad breaks • TOC • Hyphens and dashes (‐ –—) • Paragraph styles • Italics per the ms. • Glaring typos, especially the big stuff • Font oddities • Stray bits of type or blocked out type • Anything on the style sheet

Tools of the trade Resources

• Word is not a page layout program Intentionally short list • InDesign is what most designers use today • Robert Bringhurst, • But this could change The Elements of Typographic Style • Consider open source tools • MyFonts http://www.myfonts.com/ • Colin Wheildon, Type & Layout: Are You Communicating or Just Making Pretty Shapes

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Objectives Q & A

At the end of this session, participants should be able to: 1. Evaluate typeset pages for adherence to traditional standards of good composition 2. Make sensible design recommendations to clients based on readability of text and clarity of communication