easilyamused | John D. Berry’s blog

There’s something curiously recursive about linking to a website to read an article I wrote for an app-based magazine. But happily, The Magazine has just expanded its subscription base from its iOS6 app to include web subscriptions; and even non-subscribers can access and read one full article each month. (Other links that month will just show previews: the first couple of paragraphs.) So you can go right now and take a look at “Unbound pages,” my article about the typography of reading onscreen, in the Mar 28 issue.

I questioned the initial limitation of The Magazine as an iOS-only app (indeed, one that requires iOS6, which lets out older iOS devices like my first-generation iPad). But what that limitation did was focus squarely on a specific audience: tech-savvy readers who are likely to be early adopters and who work or play in one of the creative fields (which tilt strongly toward Apple’s digital ecosystem). It also meant that the app itself could be clearly and simply designed.

While there’s a difference between how the app displays an issue on an iPhone and on an iPad, the basic typographic treatment is fixed; the only real change appears if you shift the orientation, which affects how long the lines of text are. (This is all directly related to what I was writing about.) The display of the articles on the website is similarly simple and limited, but by the nature of current web-design tools (again, directly related!) it’s less typographically sophisticated, less well adapted to the screen “page.” But you can subscribe to the web version even if you don’t own an iOS6 device; that expands the potential readership.

With the current update to The Magazine’s software, you can also link, as I’ve just done, to a single article that a non-subscriber can read in its entirety, along with previews of other articles in the issue. That “porous paywall” is a smart marketing move: it encourages dissemination of material from The Magazine without giving it all away. (And the terms of The Magazine’s contracts are that they’re only buying one month of exclusivity anyway; authors can do anything they want after that first month, including posting the article for free on their own website or broadcasting it to the entire world. This seems like a model that’s well adapted to the realities of current online publishing.)

Go ahead and subscribe. There’s a bunch of other good material in the new issue, and I expect that I’ll write for The Magazine again.

[Image: detail of one of the illustrations done for my article by Sara Pocock.]

Categorized as book design, books, design, editorial design, onscreen design, publishing, tech, typography |

On Wednesday I was in Port Townsend for an “E-book Potlatch” at Copper Canyon Press. The press is housed in one of the old wooden buildings at Fort Worden, a former military base turned into a state park and cultural & arts center; Copper Canyon has been there since the 1970s, publishing some of the best in modern and international poetry. Right now they’re figuring out how to bring their backlist (and their front list) into e-book format alongside their printed books – and how to do it right. Consortium, the independent-books distributor, and the “e-book aggregator” Constellation (both part of the Perseus Books Group) sent three people to this planning meeting; according to Consortium’s Michael Cashin, Copper Canyon is on the cutting edge of creating readable e-books for poetry.

For five years in the ’90s, I was the designer for Copper Canyon’s books and collateral, and I’ve done a few projects since then, but my only current connection is as a friend and supporter of the press. Still, e-book typography is what I’ve been thinking about for the past year, so it made sense to participate in the meeting. I was impressed by the level of thinking and planning that was already going on. Both Copper Canyon and Consortium are committed to finding good ways to get books into practical e-book form right now, for immediate sale, and at the same time to developing formats that will be true to the unique demands of poetry and the future demands of technology. It’s not an easy task, but it’s well worth doing. This is an essential part of our culture.

The all-day summit was productive but exhausting. At the end of the day, Copper Canyon hosted a cook-out on the beach at Discovery Bay, where executive editor Michael Wiegers cooked up clams and prawns and salmon, and a few bottles of wine were drunk. It was one of this summer’s rare warm, sunny days, and some of the madder members of the crew ran out into the cold, cold water for a refreshing dip. That’s how the future of publishing happens.

[Photo: Michael Wiegers (left) and me on the beach at Discovery Bay. Photo by Valerie Brewster.]

Categorized as book design, books, culture, events, onscreen design, publishing, typography |

If you’re in San Francisco on June 15, I suggest that you drop by Swissnex, 730 Montgomery, between 6:30 and 9:30 p.m. to hear Jack Stauffacher in conversation with his friends. I’ve written plenty of times about Jack, who simply calls himself a printer but in fact carries on the cultural traditions of centuries of printing and learning through his practice of the printer’s trade (and, not incidentally, his practice of talking and thinking and encouraging others to do the same in his company). If I weren’t going to be in Yerevan for Granshan 2012 next week, I’d be sorely tempted to bop down to the Bay Area for the event.

This evening marks the close of “Types We Can Make,” an exhibition at Swissnex of “new typographic works from Switzerland.”

Swissnex is conveniently located just up the street from William Stout Architectural Books, which is a dangerous place to enter if you’re a bibliophile, especially if your vulnerability is in the line of architecture, typography, or graphic design. You’ve been warned.

New: Check out this very nicely done short video of Jack talking about his creative working methods and interacting with people at last week’s event.

[Photo: Jack Stauffacher at the AIGA National Design Conference in Vancouver, B.C., October 2003.]

Categorized as book design, culture, events, printing, typography |

Books are digital. This is not, strictly speaking, true; but it’s about to be, with a few honorable exceptions. Already today, pretty much all commercial books are produced digitally, although the end product is a physical one: ink printed on paper, then bound and marketed and sold. Already, the selling may be done as often online as in a bookstore. Already, the same books are being issued more and more in electronic form – even if, as yet, the e-books are mostly very shoddy in conception and execution.

But that will change. In order for it to change in a worthwhile way, we have to spell out just what form these books ought to take.

So what’s needed? How do we make good e-books? What should a good tool for designing and creating e-books look like and do? What should the result – the e-book itself – be capable of? And what should the experience of reading an e-book be like?

Last question first. If it’s immersive reading – a story or narrative of some kind – then you, as the reader, should be able to lose yourself in the book without thinking about what it looks like or how it’s presented. This has always been true for printed books, and it’s equally true for e-books.

But e-books present a challenge that printed books do not: the page isn’t fixed and final. At the very least, the reader will be able to make the font bigger or smaller at will, which forces text to reflow and the relative size of the screen “page” to change. That’s the minimum, and it’s a fair bet already today. But the reader many read the same book on several different devices: a phone, a laptop, a tablet, a specialized e-reader, or even the screen of a desktop computer.

For a real system of flexible layout in e-books and e-periodicals that might be viewed on any number of different screens at different times, what’s needed is a rules-based system of adaptive layout. I like to think of this as “page H&J”: the same kind of rules-based decision-making on how to arrange the elements on a page as normal H&J uses to determine line endings.

The requirements for this are easy to describe – maybe not so easy to implement. We need both design & production tools and the reading software & hardware that the result will be displayed on.

A constraints-based system of adaptive layout

The interesting problems always come when you have two requirements that can’t both be met at the same time. (For example: this picture is supposed to stay next to that column of text, but the screen is so small that there isn’t room for both. What to do?) That’s when you need a well-thought-out hierarchy of rules to tell the system which requirement takes precedence. It can get quite complicated. And the rules might be quite different for, say, a novel, a textbook on statistics, or an illustrated travel guide.

OpenType layout support. This means support for the OpenType features that are built into fonts. There are quite a few possible features, and you might not think of them as “layout”; they affect the layout, of course, in small ways (what John Hudson has called “character-level layout”), but they’re basically typographic. Common OpenType layout features include different styles of numerals (lining or oldstyle, tabular or proportional), kerning, tracking, ligatures, small-caps, contextual alternates, and the infinitely malleable “stylistic sets.” In complex scripts like Arabic, Thai, or Devanagari, there are OpenType features that are essential to composing the characters correctly. None of these features are things that a reader has to think about, or ought to, but the book designer should be able to program them into the book so that they’re used automatically.

Grid-based layout. It seems very obvious that the layout grid, which was developed as a tool for designing printed books, is the logical way to think about a computer screen. But it hasn’t been used as much as you’d imagine. Now that we’re designing for screens of varying sizes and shapes, using a grid as the basis of positioning elements on the screen makes it possible to position them appropriately on different screens. The grid units need to be small enough and flexible enough to use with small text type, where slight adjustments of position make a world of difference in readability.

Media query. This is the name used for the question that a program sends to the device: What kind of device are you? What is the resolution of your screen? How big is that screen? What kind of rendering system does it use for text? With that information, the program can decide how to lay out the page for that screen. (Of course, the device has to give back an accurate answer.)

Keep & break controls. These are rules for determining what elements have to stay together and what elements can be broken apart, as the page is laid out. This means being able to insist that, say, a subhead must stay with the following paragraph on the page (keep); if there isn’t room, then they’ll both get moved to the next page. It also means that you could specify that it’s OK to break that paragraph at the bottom of the page (break), as long as at least two lines stay with the subhead.

Element query. I’ve made up this term, but it’s equivalent to media query on a page level. The various elements that interact on a page – paragraphs, columns, images, headings, notes, captions, whatever – need a way of knowing what other elements are on the page, and what constraints govern them.

H&J. That stands for “hyphenation and justification,” which is what a typesetting program does to determine where to put the break at the end of a line, and whether and how to hyphenate any incomplete words. Without hyphenation, you can’t have justified margins (well, you can, but the text will be hard to read, because it will be full of gaping holes between words – or, even more distracting, extra spaces between letters). Even unjustified text needs hyphenation some of the time, though it’s more forgiving. When a reader increases the size of the font, it effectively makes the lines shorter; if the text is justified, those gaps will get bigger and more frequent. But there are rules for deciding where and how to break the line, and a proper H&J system (such as the one built into InDesign) is quite sophisticated. That’s exactly what we need built into e-book readers.

In digital typesetting systems, the rules of H&J determine which words should be included on a line, which words should be run down to the next line, and whether it’s OK to break a word at the end of the line – and if so, where. A system like InDesign’s paragraph composer can do this in the context of the whole paragraph, not just that one line. A human typesetter makes these decisions while composing the page, but when the font or size might be changed at any moment by the reader, these decisions need to be built into the software. In “page H&J,” where the size and orientation of the page itself might change, the whole process of page layout needs to be intelligent and flexible.

Up until now, in the digital work flow, the software’s composition engine has been used in the creation of the published document; the human reader is reading a static page. But now, with flexible layout and multiple reading devices, the composition engine needs to be built into the reading device, because that’s where the final page composition is going to take place.

It’s easy to create a document with static pages that are designed specifically for a particular output device – a Kindle 3, for instance, with its 6-inch e-ink screen, or a 10-inch iPad. I’ve done it myself in InDesign and turned the result into a targeted PDF. But if that’s your model, and you want to target more than one device, you’ll have to produce a new set of static pages for each different screen size and each different device. Wouldn’t it be better to have a flexible system for intelligently and elegantly adapting to the size, resolution, and rendering methods of any device at all?

[Photo: a 17th-century Mexican handbook, about the size of a hand-held device, from the collection of the Biblioteca Palafoxiana, displayed during Typ09 in Mexico City. With ink show-through from the back of the page, which will probably not be a feature of e-books.]

Categorized as book design, books, editorial design, onscreen design, publishing, tech, typography |

Two intelligent blog posts appeared today covering the new iBooks software and its choice of fonts; both of them included a link to my 2001 review of one of the new type choices: Iowan Old Style. I’m pleased to see John Downer’s Iowan Old Style get its due at last; I’m even more pleased to see iBooks expand its typographic palette in the direction of actual text typefaces. (Now about actual typography…)

Glenn Fleishman’s essay for Boing Boing is insightful and mindful of the cyclical development of typographic technology; he also mentions the current problems with trying to incorporate web fonts in e-books. Yves Peters in the FontFeed has more to say about the history of the typeface designs, and his illustrations cleverly show the fonts in all three of iBooks’ screen views or “themes.”

What I don’t understand is why Apple chose to drop three of the previous iBooks fonts (Cochin, Baskerville – really Monotype Baskerville – and Verdana). None of them were ideal for books onscreen, but why reduce the choices instead of simply adding to them?

And now the newly introduced Seravek is the only sans serif font available for reading in iBooks. It’s a nicely designed humanist sans, but it doesn’t have to be the only sans, humanist or otherwise, on the system. And the small eyes of Seravek’s e and a tend to visually close up under some circumstances.

[Image: one of the illustrations from Yves Peters’ review, showing Iowan Old Style. In the FontFeed original, you can click on any of the three sections to see the full page in that view.]

Categorized as book design, books, fonts, onscreen design, typography |

Now download my other Dot-font book

Four years ago, Mark Batty published a pair of books by me, Dot-font: talking about design and Dot-font: talking about fonts, which were intended to be the first of a series of small, handy books on typography and design. Last year, I made the first one (on design) available as a free download. Now, I’m posting the second book (on fonts) as well, also as a free download.

Please download the text of both books and enjoy them.

You can download the complete text of Dot-font: talking about fonts as a PDF, designed and formatted for onscreen reading; as a Word document; or as a text file. The illustrations that appear in the printed book are not part of these downloads; I don’t have rights to reproduce and distribute all of the images in digital form, so for the full visual effect you’ll have to buy a copy of the physical book (which of course I encourage you to do). Some of those images appeared online at Creativepro when the original columns were published, but there are quite a few original images that were created for the book: for example, the series of photos that Dave Farey made from scratch, to illustrate the process of cutting a letter by hand out of Rubylith in order to create a Letraset font in the 1960s.

This book, like the last, is published under a Creative Commons license. Please do not distribute it without that license information.

The Creativepro columns that seemed worth collecting into a book broke down naturally into three categories: design in general, typefaces or fonts, and typography or how type is used. So I’ve still got the material for a third book, Dot-font: talking about typography. Is there a demand? You tell me.

Categorized as book design, books, design, education, fonts, publishing, type designers, writing & editing |

At TypeCon in New Orleans last month, I spoke about “New problems in book design” – basically the question of how to apply good typography to the design of books that are meant to be read on a screen. Here’s a little of what I said:

“What does it mean to design a book, at a time when books take multiple forms?

“I have no answers; this is all about questions. As Nick [Sherman] said, we’re in a period that people will look back on and see as a seminal time. It is; we’re inventing this as we go along. And the reason I find it interesting is that I read books, and I’ve been designing books for twenty-five years. I’ve spent most of that time — starting out demonstrating that you could use digital typesetting and design tools to do typography every bit as good as what could be done in old metal systems. And now it’s about time to translate that onto the screen.

“One of the reasons it’s interesting now is that I think the tools are beginning to be there for us. And publishers are desperate for it.

[…]

“Basically, what we need is control over all the typographic aspects – but give up the idea of control to make a static page. We want that level of control – I want that level of control – over a dynamic page. So I can say, if somebody decides to change the type size: okay, the line length should stay the same. The number of columns would change – not just making the font larger and making the leading change, which is what happens today in a website when you do that (depending on whether the browser allows you to do that or just blows the whole page up). All those factors need to be controlled together. What we need is dynamic design, we need flexible design, we need intelligent design – intelligently flexible, intelligently dynamic – in order to create good design. And the reason for that, the purpose of that, is the readers: for us, the readers. You can’t design books well if you don’t read them, and that’s true for the screen as well as for paper.

“Every publisher I’ve talked to, every editor, even most of the writers I’ve talked to, is desperate for some kind of solution here. I know writers with backlists that they have the rights to but they don’t know what to do with; they just want to say, ‘Can I put it on a Kindle somehow?’ So the marketing and the sales of books are going to change too – dramatically. But I think that what we need to do is think globally about that, think about how to design, and sell, and market books, both in printed form – for those where that’s appropriate – and in digital form. And as much as possible, for practical reasons, design it so that you actually…so the book can grow out of one file, one set of files. It’s hard! But that’s what we need. Because otherwise, again, you’re back to doing several different versions of everything.

“So in the spirit of it all being questions, I’m concluding inconclusively, and I will throw it open to questions.”

Some of the best stuff, as you can imagine, came out in the questions.

Roger Black: “John, are you saying that we need to set, basically, an extension of HTML rules for typographical things like the relationship between line breaks and leading?”

Me: “Absolutely. How you go about it is a good question, and it’s something that I’m working on right now; but it’s important to have the capability, just as it’s important to have, in browsers and the systems that support them, support for OpenType features.

“But it’s the layout and spacing controls that are the most important part. It’s hard – but not impossible. CSS3 and HTML5 are beginning to add these capabilities. Obviously, in terms of browser constraints, not everybody is going to support that, but… It may be that you use HTML-based systems to still make applications; essentially the book could be an app, if you need control that you can’t have otherwise. I suspect that we’ll do it in both formats. It’s an open question.”

[Thanks for Jill Bell for sending me a copy of the video she shot from her phone, so I could find out what we actually said. The photos above are snapshots grabbed from that video.]

Categorized as book design, design, editorial design, events, onscreen design, publishing, tech, typography |

When Will Powers died suddenly two years ago, he left a gaping hole in the community of typographers, printers, and book-designers in this country. Now we have a small book to remind us of the work that he left behind: Type Works: the printing, design and writing of Will Powers.

It’s small in extent (50 pages) but not in format: its pages are a generous nine inches square, as befits a book that’s got to show a lot of examples of the design of other books. Oddly, there’s no one named as author or editor, which will perplex book dealers and annoy librarians; it’s simply credited to Interval Press, Birchwood, Minnesota. My copy was sent to me by Cheryl Miller, Will’s wife, and the copyright is in her name. (The information page on the distributor’s website confirms that Cheryl is the book’s editor.)

This collection of essays and reminiscences by Will’s many friends and collaborators gives a kaleidoscopic picture of the man. Although by the time I first met him, he was living and working in Minneapolis, as design and production manager for the Minnesota Historical Society Press, Will had spent many years in the San Francisco Bay Area as a letterpress printer. He and Wesley Tanner printed Fine Print for several years, and Will also wrote articles and designed covers for that remarkable publication. Reading about those times now, with names of people I came to know many years later, makes me imagine an alternate history in which, when I was living in San Francisco after I got out of college in 1971, I had somehow made contact with the local printing community. But at that young age I had no idea that typography was going to be central to my life, and I didn’t meet any of those people, or stay in the Bay Area.

Type Works is a short-run book, printed by BookMobile in Minneapolis, who specialize in short-run and print-on-demand books (and who I know from experience can do a good job of it). Given the display purpose of this book, I could wish that it had a sewn binding that would lie perfectly flat, but that’s not an option in this short a run, unless you manufacture the book by hand. I also wish I could read every word on every printed example shown, but that’s just a reflection of how fascinating the texts that Will worked on (or wrote) tended to be. This is a fine presentation of examples of Will Powers’s excellent typography and book design, of the words written about him, and of a few of his own words as well. And I love the fact that the text uses Zuzana Licko’s typeface Journal, an idiosyncratic but very readable text face of the digital era.

Categorized as book design, books, editorial design, printing, typography |

For the past couple of days I’ve been devouring Ethan Marcotte’s new book, Responsive Web Design. It’s the fourth in the series of “brief books for people who make websites” published by A Book Apart (an outgrowth of A List Apart). Each one focuses on a specific subject, and is written in a direct, conversational manner with a hands-on approach for web designers.

“Responsive web design” is Marcotte’s term for what I first heard referred to as “adaptive layout” by Microsoft’s Geraldine Wade (now Banes) when she was working on the original New York Times Reader. I usually just call it “flexible layout.” (As the Times Reader app suggests, it’s not only applicable to web pages.) The essential idea is visual design that adapts itself intelligently to the size, orientation, and resolution of the digital “page” it’s displayed on. This can be done well or badly, of course, but first you’ve got to understand the importance of doing it at all.

Marcotte is cogent and persuasive about that. And he shows you exactly how to do it, step by step, even though this is not strictly speaking a “how to” book. More important, he shows you why to do it. His last chapter suggests a reversal of the notion of “graceful degradation” in onscreen design: instead of making a complex design for a big monitor and the latest, most capable software, and then figuring out how it should deal with smaller sizes or less capable systems, he suggests starting by designing a simple, uncomplicated basic design that will work on the tiniest mobile device (“mobile first”), then adding features as (and if) they seem useful in a more expansive environment. Both approaches are adaptable and responsive, but this one seems cleaner and more elegant.

Now the area that interests me most is text typography, which Marcotte doesn’t go into in any great detail. But this just means that there’s more to be learned and invented in this area.

I’m a fan of small, handy, precisely targeted books, and the Book Apart series is just that. These books are consistently designed (by Jason Santa Maria), readable, and easily portable (despite somewhat heavy coated paper). There are a few bits of sloppiness; the proofreader could have caught the glitches in the hyphenation algorithm that produced “wides-creen” and “in-teract” as word breaks, and a copyeditor might have questioned the author’s frequent use of “to better [do this]” or “to better [do that],” but these are quibbles. Responsive Web Design and its predecessors in this series are useful, well-done tools in their own right.

Categorized as book design, books, editorial design, onscreen design, publishing |

In an unexpected confluence of two of my areas of interest, science fiction and graphic design, I discovered that design critic Rick Poynor has been waxing lyrical, over on Design Observer, about the surrealist cover paintings done by Richard Powers for so many science-fiction paperbacks in the 1950s and 1960s. I grew up on those covers. Although I knew nothing about surrealist art, nor for that matter about book design, I remember those Powers paintings as representing the mood and style of science fiction to me. They were very far from the rocketships and spacemen that might adorn a less sophisticated cover. It wasn’t until later that I learned who he was (it was rare for an artist’s credit to be included in those books), yet his visual imagination burned its way into my own, all unknowing.

Powers’s images were almost never representational; they were dreamlike and evocative, with flowing shapes, curving lines, and polished surfaces, floating in a limitless space of the mind.

Poynor takes off from a reference in the Guardian’s science fiction issue, where the editors asked a wide range of science fiction writers to describe their favorite novel or author; Christopher Priest wrote about J.G. Ballard’s early short-story collection, The Voices of Time (left). The cover of that Berkley paperback was classic Richard Powers; so was the (different) cover of a later reprinting (also from Berkley). This provides Poynor with a perfect jumping-off point.

The image to the left is not a swipe from the Guardian, but a scan of the cover of my own lovingly tattered copy of The Voices of Time. The only time I met Ballard, on a reading tour for Empire of the Sun, I had the pleasure of getting his autograph on this book that I had kept with me since I was a youthful sf reader.

Categorized as book design, books, science & art |