An Observation on Type Sizes

A short note to any book designers out there. The vast majority of commuters I observe reading Kindles have their on-screen type size set much, much larger than the default text setting. I think that this is an interesting observation, particularly given how people really avoid ever reading large-print books in public. (‘Oh, I don’t need to read a book with big type like that, my eyesight is just fine’.)
I do not know what percent of the publishing market is represented by large-print books, but it has got to be pretty niche. However, now that they have been empowered by the technology, people do tend to pump-up the type size to whatever setting they can read best at.
Perhaps we designers have been typesetting books in too small type sizes all along? A decision that up to now has always been constrained by the publishing economies of paper costs and the human ergonomics of carrying around larger books with massive page counts as much as it has by designer’s preferences for using small type sizes.
So perhaps the default type size for the next ebook you publish needs to be twice as large as what you have been using to date. Think about it.

Logotype Similarities #7429

Exhibit A: Perla logotype for Aldi’s own-brand toothpaste.

Exhibit B: Laya logotype for rebranded Quinn Healthcare.

Looking at the ‘a’ characters, this seems to be a popular choice of typeface this year…

All pairs in the ‘Logotype Similarities’ series are presented without comment and without drawing any conclusions.

Shouty-shouty Signs

Consider this post as a coda to my A4 Marketing post from last March about the many uses and abuses of the A4 page in contemporary communication.

Last week I came across this amazing example of over-instruction when I was paying for parking at an automated vending machine. I only had my old mobile with me, so these photos are very low resolution. But should be more than adequate for you get the idea. So this class of machines are generally not well regarded for the quality of their user interfaces. But realistically could its manner of operation be so obtuse as to require this amount of explanatory appendices?

This looks like the visual equivalent of those Irish people who speak-very s-l-o-w-l-y whenever explaining something to anyone who does not speak English as their native tongue. What this really says to me is that the people whose job it is to answer the phone whenever somebody cannot get their crumpled tenner into the slot are doing their best to try to ensure that they never have to answer that phone. Surely someone could take them aside and point out that making your customers feel like they are being treated like morons is never a good policy.

Not only where there about twelve notices affixed to every one of these machines, but every door I passed through in the car park had two or three similarly redundant, over-emphasised, A4 notices added to it. In the pièce de résistance, the entrance/exit barrier had three hanging A4 pages sellotaped across it, blowing in the wind, reminding you to have paid for your ticket before approaching the barrier and so forth.

One thing that the sheer abundance of this visual noise made me think again about are those currently popular futurist scenarios where we shall all soon be wearing smart glasses/implants that overlay context-specific tags onto our physical environment. Which is not too unfeasible and may not be too too far off. When there is no physical/spatial limitation on overlaying visual cruft, the results could be far worse than the eyesore shown above.

Speak To Me/The Emotional Type

Dalton Maag Exhibition 03
Originally uploaded by Aiden Kenny.

“How many flavours of vanilla do you want?” — Bruno Maag.

I brought the studio over to the Image Now Gallery for a look at the Dalton Maag typography exhibition ‘Speak To Me’. It was very interesting to see the complete typeface creation process from initial rough sketches on A3 marker pads all the way through to detailed technical film tests.

We also attended Bruno Maag’s lecture ‘The Emotional Type’ at DIT in Mountjoy Squrae. The talk was well titled, as he is an emotional and animated speaker. It is always good to see someone so passionate about what they do. I also think that we always need to have such monomaniacal characters around who obsess about details like the inconsistencies of the diagonal strokes in the light-weight characters of the headline font for The Guardian newspaper, and where the pixels fall in the lowercase O when they are displayed in our interactive television guides. Admittedly I am probably more interested in type and typography than most, but I don’t ever think I would have the mindset to grind my way through the creation process involved in producing the 700-odd characters he was talking about for the standard four-weight Latin A font package he produces for most of his clients.

His talk was wide-ranging in its scope and fairly humorous in spots: touching on some non-conventional topics as typo-porn, the joys of metal type and going to the UK National Type Library and fondling a flirty Fette Fraktur. Indeed.

We also learned why never never to use Helvetica (never) and why if everyone used the nigh-perfect, yet arid, Univers then Bruno would be out of a job. London Underground and Typhoo Tea did not fare well under his withering gaze either.

The headline quote above was his response when asked about the role of custom font creation in brand identity programmes and the observation that so much of that work today is variation around a theme of ‘warm, soft and friendly’ humanist sans-serif typefaces.

Never Judge A Book...

Occasionally I come across a site that I am somewhat reluctant to recommend, where I have found myself using up an unconscionable block of time browsing its contents. But if you are lacking a little inspiration (and are not too bothered about being envious of some tasty design briefs) then you could check out the book cover archive site.

At the initial level of engagement you can just click through the pages enjoying the juxtaposition of cover designs from different genres and categories. Clicking on each cover brings you further: to a larger image for closer inspection and comments by designers and non-designers alike, often with additional comments by the original book designer in question.

If you fall within that subset of bibliophiles who appreciate the design of a book as much as its contents, then you should find much to enjoy here. Even better, there is an RSS feed too. So if you do not want to sacrifice a couple of hours a-browsing right now, you can just get one new cover at a time whenever one goes live.

Is This Legible?

You are reading this on a screen, most likely on the CRT or LCD display of your primary computer, possibly on the small screen of your PDA, or even, at a stretch, on your smart phone.* Do you ever think about the layers of technology involved in getting this post from its origins on my PDA screen onto your screen? The last step in that sequence – the visual expression and rendering of letters and words onto your screen – is the interesting specialism of my friend Hilary Kenna. Hilary is now blogging as part of her PhD research programme. You can read her musings, cogitations and insights about on-screen (and sometimes even off-screen) typography at Type4Screen.

In a world where the amount of on-screen content is multiplying exponentially this has got to be a fruitful area of research. Admittedly, this sort of topic is appealing for design-nerds like me, but I think it can be of interest to a broader audience as well.

Having not given this topic too much thought before, I am personally most interested in the area of text on mobile screens. Most of Thoughtport is written on my Palm PDA screen in twenty minute bursts and that device’s on-screen text representation is adequate for that task. But, after reading a few novels on my PDA, I have abandoned it as a tool for long-form commuter reading. (Whether that decision was a function of the quality of the on-screen glyphs and any attendant eye-strain. Or whether my decision was driven by the allure of the insistent podcasts one wheel-click away on my iPod menu. I have not decided yet.) In my experience the PDA is far more useful as a writing tool than as a reading tool.

I am taking it that it can surely only be a matter of time until somebody solves the challenges restraining the arrival of the ‘iPod Of Reading’. Delivering on the promise of that is really going to require a serious quality bump in the legibility of handheld screen text. Even today, reading The Economist’s editorial about the twenty-fifth anniversary of the PC reminded me that the modern mobile phone is a computer in all but name, and that is how the majority of the world’s population are receiving, transmitting and managing their data. That is the current situation, not in some notional future. Where PCs are not available, mobile tech is propagating wildly. Great swathes of the world’s people are just never going to be interested in sitting in front of a PC screen. Here in Ireland I think we are still more fond of our large screens. Yes I can read my Gmail on my Nokia mobile phone, and I have tried it once just to see how it works. But I am not going to do so regularly at this stage, because the on-screen experience simply is not adequate yet.

If I was researching and thinking about text on-screen in 2006 and after, I would be looking beyond the traditional canvas of the PC screen, I would be interested in how we are going to best read, say, locations on our in-car GPRS screens, or geo-tags on my mobile, or always-on realtime Bloglines feeds on my iRead and so forth. More seriously, beyond tech-nerd frivolity, mission-critical applications like air-traffic control screens, or bedside patient monitoring screens in hospitals do come to mind...

Whatever the technological platform, we are all soon going to be reading far more text on small screens, in daylight and in poor light and on the move. Of course type design will have to play a pivotal role in adding value to that experience. Exciting times lie ahead.

—
* I am excluding the myriad possible non-screen eventualities such as that you are either reading this on paper in the handsome leather-bound edition of ‘The Complete Thoughtport: Volume One 2004–2021’ (as published in 2058) or that you are having it wired directly from ‘The Twenty-First Century Internet Archives’ into your brain via wetware implant in some far-flung future.

Delicious Tags: Hilary Kenna | On-Screen Typography | Graphic Design
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Typo-Audio

This one is a bit of a curio for the designers in the audience. Typeradio: a comprehensive audio archive of interviews with typeface designers and typographers. The audio quality is not too great on some of the interviews, and most of them could do with some ruthless editing. But for those of us who are typo-philes (and/or iPod alpha-geekoid early adopters), there is a range of content here that makes this an intriguing resource.

I have only listened to the Eric Spiekermann and Lucas De Groot interviews so far, so I cannot vouch for the majority of the interviews. There is a relaxed, informal air to the conversations. And, while you are unlikely to gain any startling insights into the type-design process, you do definitely get a flavour of the designer’s individual personalities. My one recommendation is that you can safely skip the Thirty-Questions introductions that preface each interview.

(And who would have thought that Eric Spiekermann swore so much...)

Link: TypeRadio