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Design With Type
I’ve written in the past of various books in my hobby printing library.
A recent acquisition, and one of the most avidly read, is Design In Type by Carl Dair. Lavishly illustrated, with splashes of color on many pages, it is a book which is fun to read. It also has some of the most practical and understandable advice on typography I’ve seen.
Dair writes of all elements of typography – letters, words, spaces between lines and words, texture of the paper, the overall type mass, and relationships of all of those elements.
He views the individual letters as molecules which combine with one another into word pictures. The four letters E, P, Y, and T can be grouped in 24 combinations. They can make ypet, tepy, pety, and TYPE! You can put the remaining 20 combinations together yourself, if you wish; none are in the dictionary.
Dair makes much of the concord and contrast. Most hobby printers understand some of the principles of concord. Using types of only one family of type, for example, is usually an easy and safe way to design a hobby paper. Also, anyone working with Bodoni type for a while recognizes its interplay of thick and thin lines, and finds that a nice accompanying border is one with parallel thick and thin lines.
Much of the discussion concerns contrast – contrast of size, weight, structure, form, color, direction and texture. One doesn’t have to read the book very carefully to get the point that contrast must be sharp, not timid. A 24 point oldstyle italic heading could make a pleasant contrast with 8 point sans serif in the text.
Use of two weights of the same type face needs to be approached with care. There should be a lot of contrast, lest the slightly heavier characters appear to be battered ones which belong in the hellbox.
It’s perhaps a bit of narrow-mindedness on my part, but I could never get used to a little device Dair used throughout the book – a “fracture” (|). He used it instead of hyphens to indicate a word break at the end of a line. For example: What is your favorite face, typo|
graphically speaking?
Getting back to more important things, Dair’s advice is often specific. In spacing, for example, he states that a 3 em space should be the maximum between words in normal text sizes, with greater spacing for very small sizes, and less spacing for larger sizes. Also, he points out that two old-style roman types which are only slightly different in appearance cannot be used with each other; such faces don’t meet the tests of concord, yet are not different enough to set up contrast (except perhaps where they are a great deal different in size).
One could go on and on about items of interest in the book. If you’re at all interested in the niceties of typography you should acquire the book and find out for yourself. You’ll find some goodies on every page.
Texas Cockroaches [Cont.]
MENTION was made in an Echo a couple of years ago of “inch long” Texas cockroaches. When proofreading that page, it had struck me that two inches would have been more appropriate, but it was too much trouble to reset the paragraph.
John Carroll wrote shortly thereafter, saying that one-inch-long cockroaches didn’t hold a candle to the Florida variety. He went on to tell about the Florida critters chewing his press rollers down to the core.
I had received from Kelsey a set of freshly recast rollers for the 8×12 a couple of weeks before. Shortly thereafter I had noticed that one of the rollers had some unusual pits, and complained to Eliane that the kids must have been gouging it with a screwdriver.
All of a sudden – while reading Carroll’s letter – the thought struck that maybe the kids were not at fault. I trotted out to the garage, opened the door to the shop, and apprehended a cockroach at least three inches long on the new rollers. There were several freshly chewed pits. The roach at least had the grace not to burp as it scurried away.
Mucho apologies to Brian and Craig. I should have known that such loyal AAPA members as they couldn’t possibly have mistreated those rollers. (Not that a few weird things haven’t happened on occasion when they’ve been left alone in the shop…)
Type Talk
The danger of reviewing Design With Type is that my printing should now reflect all its principles. All of you can no doubt find flaws in even this 4-page flimsy.
Body type of this 85th Echo seems to be 9 on 10 Century, perhaps of ATF parentage. A round pin mark is on a few of the characters (including the m and w); it’s just a round indentation, without a crossbar. Anyone know where a companion italic is available?
Many thanks to Frank Egner for his realistic drawing of a typical Texas cockroach, above.
Printed by Les Boyer, Houston Texas 77024 for the American Amateur Press Association & other friends.