Christina Vasilevski

I did something noteworthy last night: I attended the first class in the last course I need to complete the publishing program at Ryerson. It’s a course on book design, and it looks like it will cover a lot of the things I’m interested in: typography, clean aesthetics, creating an intuitive flow of text, and so forth.

This course should also provide some structure for my thoughts on how books can (or should) work. When I read a piece of text, I imagine the line reading for it in my head, and determine how it could be said to achieve the greatest rhetorical impact. I hear punctuation. I imagine many editors do this, even if they don’t state that they do, and that this is one of the reasons why they become editors in the first place – to make the text sound as good in real life as it does in their heads.

But anyways, I digress. I can hear punctuation. I can analyze the content with some level of success. What I really need more guidance on is form. While I can design things (this website being the best example of that), there are a lot of unspoken rules about visual layout that I’ve probably perceived, but never articulated. Things like:

• the proper balance of white space to text on a page
• choosing a set of complementary serif and sans-serif typefaces to use within a single document
• insetting images into a page so that the flow of text isn’t impeded

Judging from the first class, I think I’ll have no problem with the lessons, and I’m also really looking forward to getting some formal training with InDesign. Next week I’ll need to bring some books to class that I think have been both well- and poorly-designed. I can already think of a few examples. But I’ll save my thoughts on that subject for next week.

This Monday’s book production class focused on typography: the history of typefaces, typographic terminology, and design principals to keep in mind when working with typography.

In particular, our teacher hammered home to us this fact when dealing with different varieties of type: fonts are not fonts. What we consider fonts when we work with word processing programs are actually typefaces. True fonts are actually subsets of individual typefaces. Thus, Arial itself is not a font – it’s a typeface. However, Arial Bold or Arial Narrow Condensed are correctly considered fonts. As an editor, I can understand his insistence on adhering to proper terminology, but honestly, when you’re fighting against twenty years of misuse by Microsoft, you’re fighting for a lost cause. Just give it up already.

Anyways, other thoughts on fonts: as with most others in the field, my teacher hates “Comic Sans” with the heat of a thousand suns and thinks it should be obliterated from the face of the earth. While I’m not nearly so emphatic, I do agree that it is one fugly, overused font. His hate of Comic Sans is possibly only counteracted by his love of Caslon.

My knowledge of the different font families and the evolution of styles isn’t so comprehensive as his, but I do admit to liking and disliking certain fonts, for entirely arbitrary reasons:

Like:

• Garamond (It just looks nice.)
• Palatino Linotype (I remember using this font when I helped out with my high school’s yearbook.)
• Trajan (Mainly I like the name – best emperor of the Roman Empire, yo!)
• Century Gothic (It’s so round and curvy – it looks really nice in larger point sizes.)
• Arial  (Utilitarian! Available on almost every computer, unlike Helvetica!)
• Georgia (Interesting use of descenders and ascenders in numerals!)
• Clarendon (Mainly I just like the exaggerated tail that is seen on the capital “R” of this font.)

Don’t Like:

• Comic Sans (No. Just no.)
• Papyrus (This means you, Avatar.)
• Trebuchet MS (It looks anorexic and spindly at smaller font sizes.)