easilyamused | John D. Berry’s blog

There are always plenty of reasons to be a member of the Type Directors Club, the New York–based organization that fights a never-ending battle for truth, justice, and really great typography. But a particularly wonderful reason arrived in the mail just the other day: a little 16-page booklet called Madame Wahler’s Lucky Serif Dream Book.

This invaluable guide, written and designed by Gail Anderson and illustrated by Bonnie Clas, could set you on the road to a better life. “This book will make you a winner!” exclaims the back cover, and who could doubt it? As the introduction explains, “The Type Directors Club is the first international organization to make public a genuine and authentic guide to the connection between typography and dreams.”

The contents include a list of dream types (“To dream of ligatures denotes popularity with the opposite sex”), a typographic horoscope (“As the most sensitive sign of the zodiac, Pisces is easily devastated by poorly drawn characters”), and small ads for everything imaginable (“Miracle Open Type Necklace,” “Go Away Comic Sans Cologne,” and “PROFESSOR INA’S Tattoo Type Removal Cream”).

Remember: “Madame Wahler’s Lucky Serif Dream Book will prove itself valuable as a reference because it uses small words and lists the meanings of many popular lettering dreams.”

Categorized as advertising, books, education, letters, publishing, typography |

The first Thursday of every month features an “art walk” in downtown Seattle, when galleries throw open their doors and stay open through the evening. On the first Thursday of this month, I dropped by the newly opened storefront space of Marquand Books, on Second Avenue near the Seattle Art Museum, to see an exhibition of notable books from the 90-year history of the University of Washington Press. UW Press has been taking prizes for book design for decades, especially under its long-time art director Audrey Meyer, who retired several years ago. The range of books on display at Marquand reminded me of both the longevity and the quality of UW Press’s publishing program – and of course many of the books themselves were old friends. The way the books were displayed emphasized their covers, but you could pick them up and thumb through them to appreciate the interior design as well. (I looked to see whether the one book I’ve designed for UW Press was included – Answering Chief Seattle by Albert Furtwangler (1997) – but it didn’t make the cut.)

University presses are suffering, like all publishing ventures, from the disastrous economy and the competition of newer publishing technologies, and I’m sure UW Press is no exception. It’s well worth being reminded that a serious and creative approach to publishing, teamed with a sensitivity to book production and design, can produce volumes that we want to keep on our shelves for many years to come.

[Photo: from Marquand Books’ invitation to their “Tribute to University of Washington Press.”]

Categorized as book design, books, events, publishing |

The best use I’ve seen yet of Google Labs’ nifty new Books Ngram viewer is from Frank Chimero: “Rest in peace, medial s.” By doing a little intelligent searching on several words that would have used the long-s in earlier books but had lost that form in more recent times, he pinpointed when it changed: right around the year 1800.

Which is just about what I would have guessed, based on a thoroughly unscientific analysis of what I recall from books and publications I’ve seen from various periods. It also corresponds reasonably closely to the much more detailed summary given by James Mosley in his article “Long s,” which records not only changes in usage around the turn of the 19th century but also changes in the availability of the long-s in new type fonts.

[Image: long & short italic s, and a long-s/t ligature, from Adobe Jenson Light]

Categorized as books, culture, letters, publishing, science & art |

Cory Doctorow’s self-published book With a Little Help has just been released. It seems a little redundant to announce something done by Cory, who has one of the most ubiquitous and entertaining public personas on the web, but I had a hand in this particular project. As I wrote last May, I designed the interior of the book and did the typographic production for the printed version, although the covers are entirely out of my hands. (There are several versions of the covers.) He’s been writing about the project for Publishers Weekly, so it’s not exactly a low-profile endeavor. Nonetheless, it’s an experiment – to see how a book published entirely outside the normal publishing channels compares in sales and success to one done the normal way. Let’s see how it does.

Oh, by the way, Cory writes good stories.

[Image: one of the four alternate covers to the paperback edition, this one by Frank Wu.]

Categorized as book design, books, publishing |

This has turned out to be the year of web fonts. I don’t just mean typefaces designed for use on the web; that’s been going on for at least a decade and a half, most notably with the spread of Verdana and Georgia throughout the online world. I mean that at last we’re getting a workable system for using a variety of typefaces on web pages – and being reasonably certain that everyone viewing those pages will see the same typefaces, not some substitute based on what happens to be available on their computer.

A year ago, this seemed impossible. There was a whole track of programming at the ATypI conference in Mexico City about web fonts, and lots of interest in the topic, but there seemed to be no common ground for agreement about the right way to move forward.

WOFF

In the past year, however, the key players came together to form a Web Fonts Working Group under the auspices of the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium), and after months of hard work and persuasion, they agreed on a new format for web fonts. It’s called WOFF (Web Open Font Format), and it’s well on its way to becoming a generally accepted standard. According to Erik van Blokland, one of the creators of the format, WOFF will be “the only (!) specification that W3C will recommend for use on the web.”

All of the newest versions of major browsers, either out now or out soon, support WOFF, including the recently-released beta version of Internet Explorer 9. (Mozilla Firefox was the first to implement WOFF support; Mozilla was one of the developers of the format.) Browsers may implement other formats as well, but WOFF is likely to be the only format that’s guaranteed to work across all “modern” browsers.

Properly speaking, WOFF isn’t a new font format; it’s a software wrapper around an existing TrueType or OpenType font. The WOFF wrapper includes “metadata” – information about the font – that font vendors can use to tell you who designed the typeface, who licensed it to you, and what the terms are for that license. This is just information; there’s no enforcement involved, no DRM, nothing to prevent someone who’s willing to go to a little trouble from unpacking the font inside the wrapper. The purpose of the metadata is to make it obvious to anyone who downloads the font that it’s a web font, intended for use while viewing a web page, not a “desktop” font that you can use in any file or application you want. This whole approach is promulgated on the assumption that most people, if it’s clear and easy for them to do the right thing, will, in fact…do the right thing.

Web-font services

The newest versions of all the major web browsers support WOFF, which makes it a universal format going forward. Looking backward, of course, is another story. What about older browsers that don’t have WOFF support built in? Lots of websites will be viewed in older versions of all of the major browsers. That’s where web-font services come in.

At the same time that vendors and manufacturers are coming out with sets of fonts intended for the web, an increasing number of web-font services have sprung up, each offering its own system for supplying those web fonts to designers and end users.

There are two parts to a web-font service: 1) making the fonts available to web designers so they can specify them in the designs of their web pages; and 2) enabling those fonts to be downloaded to users’ systems when they view those web pages.

The web-font service takes care of delivering the right fonts in the right formats to each version of each browser; the website host or designer makes an arrangement with the service, usually for a fairly nominal fee, and then uses the fonts available for that service in designing their web pages.

The list of web-font services is growing almost daily; so is the list of font foundries who are offering their fonts in web versions. There are many different ideas about the best way to do this, both technically and from a business standpoint. A web designer just has to pick one and give it a try. They’re all available right now.

There is variation in quality, of course. Typekit, for instance, which is perhaps the best known, offers fonts from a lot of different foundries; some of them are better engineered for onscreen use than others. Webtype.com, launched by Font Bureau, offers not only a web-font service but several families of carefully designed new fonts, with their roots in metal but their forms dictated by what works onscreen. Adobe recently launched their web-font library, a wide selection of font families from their larger font library, and already Adobe has upgraded and improved the rendering of some of those fonts. On the web, it’s very easy to update things, to iterate; there’s no final form. Now that the floodgates have opened, you can expect things to keep changing fast, and the quality to keep getting better at a rapid rate.

For users, the WOFF revolution is a very good argument for upgrading your browser, since only the newer versions of each browser will support this format. (You may get good results from some of the backward-compatible formats offered by some web-font services, but you will get better results – the type will be more readable – with an up-to-date browser.) If you’re a web designer, it’s time to start looking into WOFF.

[Image: an apt slogan taken from the homepage of webtype.com]

Categorized as editorial design, fonts, publishing, tech, web fonts |

I was interviewed last week, along with Simon Daniels, by “unsolicited pundit” Glenn Fleishman, who writes regularly for the “Babbage” blog on The Economist‘s website. The subject was type on the web – a huge subject that I’ve been trying to write my own blog post about without success. I guess it’s easier to have someone else asking the questions (and writing up the answers) than to put it all together yourself. I think Glenn plans to write more about the subject; this one article doesn’t come close to exhausting it, but it’s a good start.

Categorized as fonts, publishing, tech, typography, web fonts |

Roger Black has been thinking about template-based editorial design for quite a while; when I was talking to him in Mexico City last year, he said he’d been focusing more and more on this kind of systematic design. Last week he, along with Eduardo Danilo, Sam Berlow, Robb Rice, and David Berlow, launched a new venture called “Ready-Media” that would market exactly that. “We’re making systems for pages, not pages themselves,” Roger said in their press release.

Over on spd.org, the website of the Society of Publication Designers, the shit hit the fan. Bob Newman’s brief article “Just Add Water” (Grids, July 20) generated a long slew of heated comments, many of them objecting to the very idea of design templates and worrying that Roger Black was (once again?) going to destroy the profession of publication design. A few people pointed out that templates have been with us for decades, and that the most likely effect may be to raise the base level of quality on low-end publications, rather than replacing “real” designers on big-ticket designs. (The real question there will be whether Ready-Media’s services are priced for low-end or high-end clients.)

Quite apart from the business of offering canned design for sale, templates are essential for what I call “automating quality.” This means not just crafting a beautiful page, but creating a flexible system that you can use to pour varying kinds of content into and create a reliably good result. When I was a compositor at Microsoft Press back in the 1980s, we worked on just this sort of problem with the books we were designing and producing. (I even found myself writing hexadecimal translation tables and complex logical “formats” in order to massage the text we imported into the CCI composition system.) On a text-paragraph level, this is also what Adobe implemented a decade later with InDesign’s multi-line composer. (In the interim, I had been writing a series of white papers for Aldus Corporation, delving into the details of the composition engines underlying, respectively, PageMaker and QuarkXPress, both of which were trying to create workable typographic defaults.)

Ideally, in a truly flexible layout system, you have the same kind of hierarchy of rules for laying out the elements on the page that you have for deciding where to hyphenate a word at the end of a line of text. It’s the same kind of “if, then” decision-making, but at different levels. I’ve seen web designers apply this kind of thinking (too rarely!) to the ever-shifting sizes and orientations of web pages, trying to make sure that the layout adapts to give the best possible result in any circumstances. (Not surprisingly, Ready-Media promises to add templates for web design shortly.) And at a simple level, even in a word-processing program, the use of paragraph- and character-level styles is a tool for intelligent automation.

Nobody can automate quality completely. At the end, you always need to apply a trained eye and make corrections and adjustments. But a good, well-thought-out decision-making system will get you to a much higher plane right from the start.

Categorized as editorial design, publishing, typography |

Do it now! Act without thinking! Do it now!

Inspired by the success of Cory Doctorow in giving away the texts of his books in every conceivable electronic form, and yet ending up selling more copies of the printed books than his publishers would otherwise expect, I have put together a digital version of Dot-font: talking about design, which you can download for free.

This PDF is designed for easy onscreen reading – or for printing out two-up on your laser printer and reading in a comfy armchair. I am also including the full text in a Microsoft Word file (.doc) and in a “plain text” file (.txt), for those who prefer either of those formats.

This electronic version is published under a Creative Commons license; you’re free to share the files, though not to claim them as your own or make money off them. (For the details of the license, look here or see the copyright page of the digital book.) I haven’t included the right to create “derivative works” based on this book – but hey, if you’ve got an idea for a stirring adventure series set in the “dot-font” universe, or if you have an uncontrollable urge to make “dot-font” action figures, let me know.

Unlike Cory’s novels and essay collections, the print version of Dot-font: talking about design is illustrated. The electronic version is not. I can’t give away other people’s images, but I can freely distribute the full text.

So go ahead, download the book. Pass it on. Let me know what you think. And let Mark Batty, my excellent publisher, know too. Let a hundred dot-fonts bloom!

Categorized as book design, books, design, education, information design, publishing, typography, writing & editing |

The demo of a new online interface for Sports Illustrated, based on HTML5, does a good job of showing off fancy magazine layout in a screen-friendly format. But it falls down when you look closely – when you tear your eyes away from the action photos and try to read the text.

Like all those current e-books, this e-magazine falls down in simple text typography. The text of the articles is justified, yet there’s no hyphenation. When your text composition engine doesn’t even hyphenate the word “grandmother” at the end of a loose line, it’s just not doing its job.

The page designers at Sports Illustrated make it even harder by shoving intrusive pull-quotes into the main text block and wrapping the text around them. This is a bad enough at any time (it says, in effect, “we don’t care about the words, just the shape”), but it’s inexcusable when you can’t even hyphenate those extra-short lines next to the pull-quotes. Text wrap and justification rarely work together. (Anybody heard of a multi-column grid?)

Oh yes, and the pull-quotes use straight apostrophes. With a non-typewriter typeface.

In a tweet today, after seeing the demo, Roger Black called it “The best digital magazine . . . yet!” Which may be true – but if so, there’s still a long way to go.

[Images at left from the YouTube video about the HTML5 new prototype.]

Categorized as design, editorial design, publishing, typography |

Cory Doctorow was in town Friday, as part of his whirlwind tour for his new book For the Win, and Linda Stone hosted a small late-afternoon gathering for him on her back deck. (Linda’s house has a glorious view of Lake Washington, and Friday turned out to be a warm, sunny day. We even spotted a bald eagle cruising overhead. “The emperor will die,” muttered Matt Ruff, gnomically.)

Cory had with him four printed copies of his next new book, the quixotic project With a Little Help, each with a different cover. This is a collection of short stories, which Cory is publishing himself in a variety of formats, some of them given away – largely to find out what happens when you do this without a regular publisher. I had designed and typeset the interior of the book, creating pages that I hoped would work both printed and bound as a perfect-bound paperback by Lulu and read as a PDF onscreen, but until Friday I hadn’t seen it printed out, except as drafts from my laser printer. Now I have an advance copy, with a cover by Frank Wu, and I’m pretty pleased with the way it all came out. The binding is flexible, and the paper is an off-white with no glare. (Cory was going to get some galleys printed at a quick-print shop in London, but found that it was cheaper just to order copies for himself from Lulu and have them delivered to him en route. A truly dispersed publishing method!) The pages seem readable, which is the whole point.

I’m not sure when the official launch is, but no doubt it’ll be soon. Meanwhile, if you’re in San Francisco this Wednesday, Cory will be doing a benefit reading at the 111 Minna Gallery, as a fundraiser for EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation).

Categorized as book design, books, publishing, writing & editing |