Computers and Typography 2 (review)

I confess a personal impetus in picking up this book, for I teach a course in applied graphic design in my university's multimedia graduate program. Many of the essays in this collection have significant value to design students and typographic rules of thumb for anyone venturing to design for the Web or screen.

Gunnlauger Si Brien offers typographic lessons on the World Wide Web on the mixing of type styles, small and bold headlines, and the use of captions under photos. The typographer must not irritate the readers with white on black, or text over an illustration. Drop caps are usable but the letters "L" and "A" can be confusing. Because people hate scrolling and hate waiting for a picture to come up, Brien's solution is to design using only the most prevalent tools, a browser window 640 pixels wide, and columns to separate text and imagery. The author notes how often documents on the Web resemble junk mail and details what can be learned from that moneymaking medium. For a printable window, the size of 520 pixels wide is recommended, which Brien divides into 120 pixels for navigation, 390 pixels for two text columns and a 10 pixel gutter.

In a similarly useful essay, Ari Davidson recommends 10 to 12 words on a line, about 60 to 65 characters for a line that the eye can read comfortably—less than 40 characters can make the reader impatient. Cascading style sheets (CSS) can be risky, interpreted differently between browsers. He urges the designer to never specify an exact font size, but to use relative sizes ("+1") and laments that on the Web there is still no useful way to specify leading. Good fonts for body text readability are Microsoft Verdana, Apple's Geneva and both platforms' Helvetica and Arial, yet the default serif font Times is lamentably unreadable at small sizes. Davidson notes that the font that works well in a .GIF can appear odd in a browser, and recommends the use of Adobe Acrobat PDFs where a font must appear in print quality.

International issues in typography are important in the contemporary globalized office or classroom; my classes this semester include students from several midwestern American states and Canada, Taiwan, Thailand and Nepal. In the early 1990s, digital fonts allowed The Tenderloin Times to publish—in Vietnamese, Thai, Cambodian and Laotian—a newspaper serving its San Francisco, California, neighborhood's many southeast Asian families. In this book, Fiona Ross discusses non Latin typefaces, citing Kanji (used in both Chinese and Japanese), Bengali, Tamil, Shinhala and Assamese. Eichi Kona continues the discussion in noting that typographers of 10-point Kanji often insert "rubi" phonetic characters, derived from Ruby 5.5 point font. Kona states: "Japanese is the second most-used language on the Internet after English," but this reviewer recently read that over half the world's web sites are now Chinese.

In the book's other essays, Ian McKenszi-Ken recounts the close procedural ties between the typographer and printer in the days of hot metal craft, making today's credit line "Designed and set by . . ." an oddity without historical precedence. David Jury credits Lettraset's transfer lettering, available since 1965, as a major influence on today's digital typography. Michael Harvey reminds us that, despite the computer, the mind and hand are essential and engaged in the drawing of letters.

Richard Southall investigates the economic pressures on telephone directories and their designer Ladislaw Mandel. Southall provides a case study on the rasterization of stroke weights in these directories, favorably citing the Metafont language of computer scientist (and author of a major programming textbook) Donald Knuth. In the final essay, Rosemary Sasson discusses child-oriented typefaces and how word shape, long ascenders and descenders impact them.

While type on the Web was a major subject in Computers and Typography 2, this reviewer would have liked to see at least one essay discussing typographic issues in the development of personal digital...