Category Archives: Typography
This is the story of a book. It starts in a waiting room, where the lady sitting next to me had a spiral bound book on her knee. It looked — it screamed – “home made.” It wasn’t something you’d want to try to read. I couldn’t let it go by without doing something to help, if I could. Here’s what the cover looked like: In the last post I talked about pictures that are too small to be useful in … Continue reading
One of the things that messes up a design faster than almost anything else is the choice of fonts. Lots of fonts. As many fonts as the person feels he or she can use. The result is a fragmented mess that screams “amateur!” to anyone who reads it. There are good font choices, and bad ones, but the first bad choice is “Lots!” There are almost no ads, magazines, fliers or other documents that need more than two typefaces, one … Continue reading
Issues 16 and 17 of the Creative Tips newsletter are now live on the newsletter page. Number 17 covers “capital offenses” — all those places where people commonly use ALL CAPS, but shouldn’t. (Hint: It’s most of the time!)
Type designer Thomas Phinney posts in his blog that Microsoft Office 2010, due to be released as a “technical preview” in July, will make a giant leap forward in its handling of typefaces: it will begin to support some (not all, by a long way) of the many advanced typesetting capabilities built into modern fonts (a standard known as OpenType, which I’ll expand on later in this post).
How to make your Microsoft Word or Open Office documents look ten times better and more professional
Microsoft Word, Open Office, Corel WordPerfect: they’re everywhere. Almost every business in the Americas, Europe, Australia (or 90 percent of the rest of the world, for that matter) uses one of these Big Three or an equivalent. We used to use typewriters, when they were fairly cheap and computers were super-expensive. Now computers are dirt cheap, so we use word processors. It didn’t even take long for the revolution to happen. A modern word processing program is a fantastically sophisticated … Continue reading
I’ve been amazed how many people have told me — enthusiastically — that after reading Creative Tips #5 they are battling to overcome their years-long habit of typing two spaces after a period. Those typewriter habits we learned at our mothers’ (or fathers’ secretaries’) knees are sometimes hard to break, but folks tell me they’re persevering! Oddly enough, the two-spaces thing never was considered correct in the UK, so ex-pat Brits don’t have a problem with it. It’s all in … Continue reading
Number 5 covers such things as “two spaces after a period” and other typewriter practices that don’t belong in proportionally-spaced type. It’s also true that when you type something in a word processor these days, you’re not strictly “typing” in the accepted sense of that word. What you are really doing is a simple form of “typesetting,” and the rules are different! You can find Issue 5 here.
From the amazing amount of feedback I’ve been getting to the Creative Tips newsletter, it’s clear that there’s a vacuum of basic “how-to” information on simple layouts and making documents look good in standard office-type programs. This is mildly surprising, considering how many books, websites, etc., have been devoted to the topic over the years. On the other hand, I’ve looked at Microsoft’s website and discovered that the good stuff is hard to find. Lots of “Gee Whiz!” but the … Continue reading
Here’s a brilliant animation that presents the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in various flavors of Helvetica. Considering how clinically “clean” Helvetica is — the most beautiful or the most boring typface in the world, depending on whose opinion you ask — the amount of emotion and poignancy that Seth Brau imbues it with is amazing. Two big thumbs up, as they say in the movie biz.
Thomas Phinney, the noted type designer who designed at Adobe for many years, is conducting an informal survey of people who use type (fonts, typefaces) on their computers. He’s interested in how people use the terminology of type, and although some of the questions are undeniably of interest mainly design geeks he also wants input from more casual type users, such as people who use only the standard office type programs such as Microsoft Word, Open Office, and the like. … Continue reading
