Rules of Thumb

It is difficult to set out guidelines for font usage, because almost any rule can be brilliantly broken under the right circumstances.

• General guidelines:

  • Never lose track of the kind of work you're doing. An effect that would ruin a newsletter might be just the thing for a record cover. Know when you can safely sacrifice legibility for artistic effect.

  • Keep in mind the final reproduction process you'll be using. Some effects (like reversed type, white on black) can be hard to read off an ordinary 300-dpi laser, but will work if finals are done on a high-resolution printer, such as a Linotronic. Will the pages be photocopied? Offset? Onto rough paper, shiny paper? All these factors can and should influence your choice of fonts and how you use them.

  • Running some comparative tests is a good idea. Better to blow off a few sheets of laser paper now than to see a problem after thousands of copies are made.

  • No one can teach you font aesthetics; it must be learned by example. Look at beautiful magazines, posters, books with wide eyes, so that you can see how it's done. Examine ugly printed matter critically and consider why it's hard to read.

• Good rules of thumb:
  • If you need a condensed font, find one that was designed that way, rather than scaling an existing font down to a percentage. Any scaling distorts a font's design; excessive scaling interferes with legibility - this goes for widening as well as narrowing. Extended faces do exist, although they aren't as common as condensed ones.

  • Many people feel that bold or italic type, or type in ALL CAPS, is more legible: ``This is the most important part of the newsletter, let's put it in bold.'' In fact, legibility studies show that such type is actually harder to read in bulk. Keep the text in a normal style and weight, and find another way to emphasize it - box it, illustrate it, run it in color, position it focally.

  • Too much reverse type - white on black - is hard on the eyes. It can be a nice effect if used sparingly. Don't reverse a serif font, though - its details will tend to fill in. Stick to reversing bold sans-serifs, and remember to space them out a bit more than usual.

  • It is always safest to use a plain serif font for large amounts of text. Because Times is widely used, it doesn't mean it should be avoided. Fonts like Palatino, Times, Century Old Style are deservedly popular because people can read a lot of text set in such faces without strain.

    Don't expect anyone to read extensive text set in a condensed font.

  • As point size gets bigger, track tighter, and (if the software allows) reduce the spacebands as well. A spaceband in a headline size (anything over 14 point) should be about as wide as a letter ``i''.

  • If you only have a few large headlines, hand-kerning the type, pair by pair, can make the end result much more pleasing. Besides, working with fonts this closely makes them familiar.

  • Column width and justification are major elements in design. The narrower the column, the smaller the type can be; wide rows of small type are very hard to read. Often it's a better idea to set narrow columns flush left rather than justified, otherwise large gaps can fall where hyphenation isn't possible.

  • Use curly quotes.

  • Don't put two spaces at the end of a line (. ) instead of (. ) when using a proportionally spaced font.