All day type special

(nearly) All day typography session with Graham. Moving on from messing around with single words and phrases to whole paragraphs and columns. To start with we took a block of text and arranged it to fill one column:

Initially I thought it would be better to make the text full justified, but after actually reading the text I quickly learnt that this is not the case, so I aligned it to the left again

We then used the same block of text in four columns, using different points sizes and different leading to make them all fill the columns in order to establish which was the most readable. Personally I would say the third column was the most readable, however some would disagree and say the second was more effective. Generally, for printed text, it is good to use 8pt or 9pt text with leading of about 120% of this...around 11pt.

 

After this, using the same point size and leading, we put the same text in four different column widths to again establish which was the most readable. Again the second and third columns were the most readable, and generally are the types most used in magazines and newspapers. As a rule of thumb it is best to have 5/6 words/36 characters minimum and 10/12 words/72 characters maximum in a column.

We then investigated a few different typefaces, weights, and alignments. It is interesting to note how different typefaces and weights will affect the overall 'tone' of the paper. As far as alignment is concerned, there are very decent few uses for fully justified/centered/right justified text.

 

We then went on to look at paragraph breaks and which method might be the most effective. It is possible to either leave a space or indent the beginning of the paragraph (which most commonly would be about 3/4 characters). Only one of these should be used for a piece of text, never both. Leaving a line is perhaps more effective to give the impression of less text to read.

A comparison between the two methods is shown below; it is clear to see how a slightly lesser leading in combination with paragraph spacing gives the impression of less text, despite there being the same number of words.

We were then given a longer piece of text to arrange onto an A4 page in whatever way we liked. I chose to use Perpetua, an early Eric Gill typeface, with paragraph spacing and a fairly large leading. It wasn't too bad I suppose:

And then the same with an image. 

We were then challenged to see how large we could make the image whilst keeping the type readable. I kind of forgot were supposed to be making it massive so it's still fairly average, I think it's quite nice anyway:

And last but not least, we were given free reign to create a spread that made some use of white space, as this is the most effective tool to persuade people to read the text. It was getting a bit late by this point so I almost completely disregarded the grid and just threw things around for a bit.