Introduction to typography

The print house, at home

This introductory article is followed by another about the choice of typefaces for designs and publications.

It’s surprising how little sensitivity about typography most computer users show. Although the basic configuration of a domestic or office equipment, with a laser or an inkjet printer, enables us to create documents printed with a quality not far from the printing press, most people is satisfied using the computer like a kind of sophisticated typewriter. And it’s not only that. It should be much more! With this sort of equipment, we have in our hands what just a few years ago was only possible for important publications: to print in full colour, at a high resolution, and with many fonts to choose. It has always seemed to us one of the most fascinating features of computers, if not most fascinating. The importance of typography does not have to be exaggerated — you don’t need many refinements to a few printed sheets of a report, a questionnaire or a listing. But using always the default fonts and paragraph settings and not paying attention to the typesseting of longer documents, it’s something else. Its very boring. It’s underusing things that we already have. It’s like always eating the same meal, until somebody serves something different. So, we must use the typesetting resources that we have, and use them well. In order to choose a different font in a program, it’ simplicity itsef: there’s no excuse, even for the most inexpert user: normally, it is an option within the menu of Format - Font: there we will be able to choose between the list of available fonts (installed or loaded); and many programs include a bar of tools where we can more quickly choose the font, its size and other properties.

With Windows you already have a standard series of fonts that you might find probably overused. Some people have authentic aversion to some of them, especially to Comic Sans or Times New Roman or Arial (Helvetica — there’s nothing wrong with the two last: arguably they’re excellent, utilitarian typefaces. But they have been overused for years. It’s been said that there’s no such thing as good fonts or bad fonts, only appropiate fonts for a specific project. And even a good font, used repeatedly, may feed up people: even the caviar, eaten every day, would do!

The remedy is very simple, because any program (Office, StarOffice, WordPerfect, CorelDraw...) comes with dozens, if not hundreds, of additional fonts that can be good alternatives for your texts. In addition, there is a plethora of web pages in the Internet where you can get fonts for free or purchase them. We’ll offer some links in this section.

Screen fonts

Of the many fonts that we can use, some are especially designed to be seen in a computer screen, and special care has been taken of making them very easily legible in the conditions of low resolution of these screens. In the past years, if you had installed Internet Explorer (or merely your ordinary Windows system), you surely find them installed in our machine. Fonts like Verdana, Tahoma, Trebuchet and Georgia, called the “Web fonts”. There’s no better collection of special fonts for the screen, formerly offered gratuitously by Microsoft in their Typography website (and also included with Windows 98 or later.) If you don’t have these fonts already, it is worth the trouble to install them in your system, because with these fonts, the experience to work with the PC or to browse is much more comfortable for your eyes. Georgia is very elegant, and in screen looks better than Times New Roman. Even its cursive is very legible: and it has some professional details, like the numerals in the old style (non-lining figures.) Verdana and Tahoma are excellent sans serif fonts that can replace the rather boring Arial perfectly. Trebuchet is a sans serif humanistic font, similar to Meta or Officina, with a small curved tail in the l . All these fonts are free, we repeat, come in a full family (normal and cursive, , both in regular and bold weights.)

Some of our favourites:

Choosing fonts for a document.

If many users of PC won’t bother to ever change the default font of the program they use, there’s also people who, mindlessly use any font they have for their projects, often in a clearly inadequate form. If you want to read an article in which we extend this subject, move on to the next article.

In the choice of fonts, the main guideline we can follow is our own taste, but it helps to consider some principles as well, in special the legibility and readability when it comes to typeset documents that are meant to be read. For shorter text blocks we have greater freedom of choice, and for the titles we can use almost any font we want, based on the spirit of the document and the sensation that we wish to convey.

The legibility of the characters is a property derived from the same design of the fonts. Traditionally, the letters with serifs (those bars appearing at the end of the letter shapes) are considered the most legible, although in a computer screen, given the low resolution it has, compared to the printed page, it may be the opposite: sans serif fonts like Verdana or Arial can be more legible. The ornamental fonts or calligraphic typefaces shouldn’t be used beyond a few lines, since they would be immediate cause of eye strain... When we choose a font from the many available ones, we have a series of designs that encompass several centuries of typographic design and type evolution. Letters in the style of Bembo are based on designs of the XV and XVI centuries. Other fonts have been designed a few years ago, or even recently. A contiunuous evolution in the forms of the characters exists that is interesting to know. In Internet we found all a series of pages that deal with this subject, and you can also find diverse books that deal with the same, like the excellent book by Adrian Frutiger, who designed Univers, Frutiger and Linotype Didot.

Some letters are associated to a certain historical period, or a place in the world. Immediately we associate what it has been printed with them to these times. Others, like Garamond, have a more untemporal nature —immortal, we could say— and they often are so fresh today as in the moment they were created, sometimes centuries ago. In order to choose one font or another, and to combine some fonts in a same document, we can pay attention to the recommendations that some experts do. For example, the Esperfonto system, put together by Daniel Will-Harris, classifies the letters according to the sensation, the taste that they confer to a document, instead of historical or technical criteria.

Many designers and type directors prepare and use a palette of fonts with a serif typeface for the text, a sans for the subtitles, captions, summaries... and perhaps a special, decorative or display font for the main title. It is a formula that is simple and effective. It’s better to avoid the mixture of different sans fonts or different serif fonts; it is a combination that rarely works. On the other hand, at the time of defining the typesetting attributes in a document, a series of rules by the professional practice must be considered. They’re easy to remember (even most PC users and even many professional designers fail to follow them.) In the section of graphic design we deal with in detail; see the article about the composition text for digital documents.

An era of typographic changes

The typography lives moments on deep changes. And paradoxical situations occur, derived from the unstoppable popularization of the Web. The same meaning of what it is a typeface has changed several times throughout the century, and with the digitisation the change has been radical, at least regarding the individual use that we can do in our own computers. This peculiar name, fonts talks about past technologies, already obsolete, of manufacturing types for the press based on the cast metal and molds.

Although the font display resources of the navigators have been allegedly miserable (although the style sheets, CSS, have solved some of the deficiencies), new fonts are created continuously, and in the Internet the digital type foundries proliferate, there are many pages dedicated to the typography, free font servers... indeed, it’s really surprising the variety and quality of the resources about typography in the network. We share some links in the different pages of this section, and some of them link at their turn to thousands of resources.

The typography in Internet has suffered, then, serious limitations, and if we limit ourselves to documents in HTML it’s very difficult to control the typesetting and fonts of a page in the navigator (because the visitor may not have installed the font we specified or because its local configuration makes the browser display a different one.) In the past years a “solution” of substituting text by images has been widely used, as we explain in the article Text as image. The main disadvantage of the text in graphic format is that it cannot be handled like text: it is an image, and the text that contains cannot be recovered or edited.

For the Web pages there isn’t yet a universally accepted standard of embedding fonts. Not surprisingly, almost no webmaster chooses to include embedded font objects within the websites. Remember, though, that if the control of the layout and the fonts is absolutely critical for the dissemination of your documents, there are alternatives like the widely used Acrobat PDF.