Computers and Typography 2
Compiled by Rosemary Sassoon
Intellect Books Ltd. <www.intellectbooks.com, Bristol, UK & Portland,
OR USA, 2002
158 pages, ISBN 1-84150-049-6
Reviewed by Michael R. Mosher
Saginaw Valley State University,
University Center MI 48710 USA
mosher@svsu.edu
This reviewer confesses a personal impetus in picking up this book,
for I teach a course in applied graphic design in my university's multimedia
graduate program. Many of the essays in this collection have significant
value to design students and typographic rules of thumb for anyone venturing
to design for the Web or screen.
Gunnlauger Si Brien offers typographic lessons on the World Wide Web
on the mixing of type styles, small and bold headlines, and for the
use of captions under photos. The typographer must not irritate the
readers with white on black, or text over an illustration. Drop caps
are usuable but the letters L and A can be confusing. Because people
hate scrolling, and hate waiting for a picture to come up, Brien's solution
is to design using only the most prevalent tools, a browser window 640
pixels wide, and columns to separate text and imagery. The author notes
how often documents on the Web resemble junk mail, and details what
can be learned from that moneymaking medium. For a printable window,
the size of 520 pixels wide is recommended, which Brien divides into
120 pixels for navigation, 390 pixels for two text columns and a 10
pixel gutter.
In a similarly useful essay Ari Davidson recommends ten to twelve words
on a line, about 60 to 65 characters for a line that the eye can read
comfortably--less that 40 characters can make the reader impatient.
Cascading style sheets (CSS) can be risky, interpreted differently between
browsers. He urges the designer to never specify an exact font size,
but to use relative sizes ("+1") and laments that on the Web
there is still no useful way to specify leading. Good fonts for body
text readability are Microsoft Verdana, Apple's Geneva, both platform's
Helvetica and Arial, yet the default serif font Times is lamentably
unreadable at small sizes. Davidson notes that the font that works well
in a .GIF can appear odd in a browser, and recommends the use of Adobe
Acrobat PDFs where a font must appear in print quality.
International issues in typography are important in the contemporary
globalized office or classroom; my classes this semester includes students
from several midwestern American states and Canada, Taiwan, Thailand
and Nepal. In the early 1990s digital fonts allowed the Tenderloin Times
to publish in Vietnamese, Thai, Cambodian and Laotian, a newspaper serving
its San Francisco, California neighborhood's many southeast Asian families.
In this book, Fiona Ross discusses non-Latin typefaces, citing Kanji
(used in both Chinese and Japanese), Bengali, Tamil, Shinhala and Assamese.
Eichi Kona continues the discussion in noting that typographers of 10
point Kanji often insert "rubi" phonetic characters, derived
from Ruby 5.5 point font. Kona states "Japanese is
the second most-used language on the Internet after English", but
this reviewer recently read that now over half the world's websites
were Chinese.
In the book's other essays, Ian McKenszi-Ken recounts the close procedural
ties between the typographer and printer in the days of hot metal craft,
making today's credit line "Designed and Set by..." an oddity
without historical precedence. David Jury credits Lettraset's transfer
lettering, available since 1965, as a major influence on today's digital
typography. Michael Harvey reminds us that despite the computer the
mind and hand are essential and engaged in the the drawing of letters.
Richard Southall investigates the economic pressures on telephone directories,
and their designer Ladislaw Mandel. Southall provides a case study on
the rasterization of stroke weights in these directories, favorably
citing the Metafont language of computer scientist (author of a major
programming textbook) Donald Knuth. In the final essay Rosemary Sasson
discusses child-oriented typefaces, and how word shape, long ascenders
and descenders impact them.
While type on the Web was a major subject in Computers and Typography
2, this reviewer would have liked to have seen at least one essay discussing
typographic issues in the development of Personal Digital Assistants
(PDAs), cel phones and even beepers, since my class designs "baby
faces", text and icons for mobile and handheld applications. In
this hardware arena, current technological limitations force us back
to many of the limitations upon typography under which the computer
font designers worked two decades ago.