Our client wanted a cover that encapsulated the iconoclastic spirit of the Enlightenment — the birth of skepticism, secularism and the full flowering of the scientific method. The natural candidates for this were Voltaire, the great French thinker and Emile du Chatelet, his intellectual equal and lover. We selected three period-appropriate typefaces for the title: p22 Declaration, based on the penmanship on the American Declaration of Independence, Bodoni, designed in 1798 and Requiem Text, based on the humanist typefaces of Renaissance Italy. The typefaces and painting formed a harmonious combination, and Voltaire stares out at the viewer with a frank air of challenge.

‘Handwritten’ typefaces are a popular area of computer-based typography. The too-perfect edges and shapes created by layout and design packages often seem to need humanising, softening, a touch of variety and irregularity. The OpenType format has enabled the emergence of a new generation of typefaces with hundreds or even thousands of alternate characters, ligatures and other typographic goodies. For example, Liza Pro inserts a variety of different ligatures and alternate characters as the user types, giving text a warm and idiosyncratic feel.

If you’d like to go a step further and personalise a document with your very own inimitable handwriting, www.fontcapture.com allows users to print out a special form, then pen an instance of each letter of the alphabet, numbers and other special characters. When scanned in and uploaded, Font Capture uses the sheet to automatically digitise your handwriting and save the result as a typeface. If you like what you see (and the results can be somewhat erratic), the typeface can then be installed.

Europe is the mecca of print design. In countries like Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, Italy and France, typography and the practice of design is a topic for serious discussion. And serious discussion is what you will get with Type Radio. Their motto conveys something of the air of endearing earnestness that surrounds them: “Type is speech on paper. Typeradio is speech on type.” With over 400 episodes available for downloading through Itunes, or directly through their site, a great deal of information awaits potential listeners. The members of the Dutch based collective spend a lot of time attending design conferences and talking to established and emerging designers, so their show is an excellent way of tapping into the design Zeitgeist.

You’ve visited all the type vendors and searched in vain. There’s nothing that quite matches up with the search image in your head. ‘I could do a better job myself!’ you cry.

Fortunately for you. Fontshop has recently added an interesting functionality to their website: a typeface constructor. The FontStruct site equips you with an array of basic font shapes that can be moved arround lego-like on an underlying grid to form letters. Although the basic shapes are simple, when used in concert, the results are quite sophisticated. A gallery shows the variety of effects achieved by contributors.  Once you have put together your masterpiece (and that might just be an uppercase set of letters, or an extended character set), your typeface can be saved as a truetype font and used out in the ‘real’ world. Over 160,000 people have signed up with FontStruct and 7,000 typefaces have been saved for public use. At the very least, the site is a worthy educational tool for those interested in typefaces, and reinforces the notion of an underlying grid over which the letterforms are arranged/organised.  Oh, and it is completely free.

At the simplest level, readability is about not getting between the reader and the content. According to Robert Bringhurst, “Typography with anything to say … aspires to a kind of statuesque transparency.”  While magazine and advertising design is often about display typefaces, novelty and high impact, book design is much more self-effacing. Book designers aim for an intelligent understanding of the content they are typesetting, and type selection that aids that content.

There are a few rough rules of thumb for creating readable text. Serifed typefaces are generally easier to read than unserifed faces. Ornate, fussy typefaces should be reserved for headings/display type only. Generous interline spacing (120% of type height is often cited as an ideal) makes type easier to read, but only up to a point. ‘Rivers’ of white space running vertically through a poorly set body of text make it harder to read. Judicious hyphenation gives text a more even ‘tone’, but excessive hyphenation is distracting. Line lengths of approximately 10-15 words are ideal. A type size of between 10 and 12 points will work for most readers, ranging up to 16pts for those with some vision impairment. Narrow margins leave no space for a reader’s hands, and  paper thickness and colour also play a role in enhancing readability, not to mention lighting conditions. On monitors, screen contrast and brightness, refresh rates, type size and distance from the screen are factors.

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