Meeting Summary: July IDUG: Typography with Thomas Phinney

Thu, Jul 9th, 2009 at 6:30 PM

PSU Market Square Building

Event Details

We met on the 10th floor of the PSU Market Square Building, 1515 SW 5th Ave., Suite 1054 in downtown Portland. There was a beautiful view of the Portland skyline from the window.

Our chapter representative, Paul Erdman welcomed us. Tonight's guest speaker was the Senior Product Manager for Font Solutions at Extensis, Thomas Phinney (thomasphinney.com), to talk about typography and InDesign.

THOMAS' LEGIBILITY GRIPE
First was a rant about legibility. Graphic designers tend to work inside good conditions. However, we should seriously consider the people who read the printed layout or the web page in not so good conditions. In fact, we should probably think of the person reading our layouts in the worst of likely conditions -- for instance, program booklets and handouts are usually terrible to read in a darkened room.

Thomas showed us screen shots of colored type on various colored backgrounds. There really should be more contrast between the type and background to get the reader to more easily read the text.

Although there are more restrictions with fonts in web designing, it's very important to be aware of the worst likely conditions (screen font compared to a printed font), for instance with the increasing use of mobile devices to view the web with smaller print or legible print issues, font choice is even more important.

Here are some general rules about making type more legible:

• More contrast helps
• Thicker type
• Use a better font for a smaller size
• Use type that has a larger X-height (the length from the bottom to the middle of the character)
• Use fonts that have a larger aperture (the distance of the open gap such as in the character C)
• Avoid using mixed thick and thin lined typefaces
• Avoid, if you can, the use of condensed type where possible.

Serif and San Serif typefaces
In addition, Thomas showed us comparisons of various typefaces. Of course normally using a serif typeface is best for smaller body text or even smaller-sized jobs. However, some are better than others:

Good: Lucida, Bookman, Chaparral, Caption
Okay: Times Ten (optimized for 10 point)
Bad: Times, Palatton
Ugly: Bodoni, Balbon

INFANT FORMS
Thomas also talked about infant forms, comparing Gill Sans and Bembo. The idea was that infant forms would help teach children how to write as well as read. The way the g, a, and other characters are used, is many times different, depending upon the typeface. Thomas' main gripe was that the infant form fonts are used too exclusively in children's literature, and that children can handle the various forms. There were some teachers in the audience who disagreed.

MAKING FONTS
Thomas also showed us how fonts are made using Windows Fontlab Studio. He was working on a Gothic Grotesque style of typeface. He also showed us how optical illusions occur with long typefaces. He actually needs to compensate with a thicker vertical line than the horizontal lines of a font character.

FONT CORRUPTION
This is a common problem. If you experience this, try to re-install the font. Font Doctor is good and also Font Validator for Windows. There's also a free Font Kit by Adobe. Of course Thomas is really partial to the features of Extensis Suitcase (extensis.com).

Thomas said that the Mac's FontBook is better than nothing and really improved working with fonts in the Mac OS. He's still promoting Suitcase with its font autoactivation features, and they're able to make sense from your confusing font collection. For instance, the Mac's Zapfino has been updated three times and it will be confusing to tell which version you're using.

MORE INDESIGN TIPS
Manual, human kerning, or adjusting the distance horizontally between the text characters is always preferable to automatic optical kerning, but InDesign's optical kerning is better than nothing.

You can use Windows Type 1 (PostScript) fonts on a Mac, and even Windows TrueType fonts (although it may require some special Mac requirements) by moving these fonts to your Home/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Fonts folder.

(I can't confirm this from my notes, as this hint was given very quickly, so your mileage may very.)

Thomas recommends using menus and character panels to make adjustments to the style of special characters, ligatures, fractions, etc. This keeps the overall text correct and doesn't use incorrect tricks that may alter everything for future use, if you alter the text.

POSTSCRIPT VERSUS OPEN TYPE FONTS
Thomas was preaching to the choir about the superiority of OpenType fonts. The Adobe PostScript font has 228 possible glyphs, where the OpenType font will have 53,000 possible glyphs available to it. OpenType fonts are a single file and the same file is compatible on both Windows and Mac operating systems.

The OpenType fonts also use Unicode encoding that work the same on both Macs and PCs. If you've ever received a series of boxes in your e-mail text, it's because you got an e-mail from another computer platform that used a font that didn't have Unicode encoding -- meaning that the keyboard characters don't 100% match with the other computer platform. Unicode encoding solves this problem.

OpenType fonts also have superior automatic ligature features, so when you get an ffi or fj or TA the ligature kerns appropriately. The same with figure styles 911856 looks very different from the other font formats. Ordinals like 1st, 2nd, 3rd are formed without having to use the superscript or subscript trick, and fractions work superior to superscripting techniques. Thomas recommends that you don't turn on fractions globally, though. Only use it as needed.

OpenType fonts also are able to make small caps and offer a series of other contextual alternatives and ligature strangeness.

CONTEXTUAL FONT TRICKS
Thomas showed us some stupid font tricks that are available on some OpenType fonts:

• Francophile font: You type in a sentence and each word changes into it's french translation. Of course, it's not the proper sentence structure, but it's still pretty cool.
• Mystic font: You type in a question and it answers it, like those toy 8-balls.
• CrankyKid font: You type in what you need to do and the type changes to whiny complaints and what the kid would rather be doing.
• Myriad Pro Censored font: As you type, the sentence is interspersed with @#$& type swear words.

AND NOW, A PHOTOSHOP AND ILLUSTRATOR USER GROUP
One of the people in the crowd stepped up and promoted Adobe's new Portland Digital Designers and Artists group that discusses Photoshop and Illustrator and meets on the alternating months that the InDesign user group doesn't meet. August 13, 2009 from 6:00 p.m. - 9:00 p.m. is the next meeting. Go to their website and get more information (Portland Digital Designers and Artists).

RAFFLE PRIZES
Tonight, as every meeting, Paul Erdman raffled off a copy of Adobe InDesign CS4. He also raffled off a copy of Ctrl-PS which is an InDesign plug-in that keeps track and tells you which version of text in a layout you are working in and optimizes your workflow.

Summary by Portland IDUG Group member Rick Rudge