Professional typographers avoid using Times New Roman for book-length (or brief-length) documents. Bodoni and other faces with exaggerated stroke widths are effective in headlines but hard to read in long passages. You also should shun type designed for display. For this reason faces in the Bookman and Century families are preferable to faces in the Garamond and Times families.
Type with a larger “x-height” (that is, in which the letter x is taller in relation to a capital letter) tends to be more legible. Experiment with several, then choose the one you find easiest to read. Use the most legible face available to you. Any face with the word “book” in its name is likely to be good for legal work.īaskerville, Bembo, Caslon, Deepdene, Galliard, Jenson, Minion, Palatino, Pontifex, Stone Serif, Trump Mediäval, and Utopia are among other faces designed for use in books and thus suitable for brief-length presentations. Professional typographers set books in New Baskerville, Book Antiqua, Calisto, Century, Century Schoolbook, Bookman Old Style and many other proportionally spaced serif faces. Both the Supreme Court and the Solicitor General use Century. Use typefaces that were designed for books. Caecilia, Clarendon, Lucida, Officina Serif, Rockwell, and Serifa are in this category. If you admire the typewriter look, choose a slab-serif face with proportional widths. For this reason, no book or magazine is set in monospaced type. When every character is the same width, the eye loses valuable cues that help it distinguish one letter from another. With electronic type it is no longer necessary to accept the reduction in comprehension that goes with monospaced letters. Monospaced type was created for typewriters to cope with mechanical limitations that do not affect type set by computers. Exhibition part written by Jérôme Knebusch (curator).Here, some suggestions for making your briefs or texts more readable: Foreword by Christelle Kirchstetter and Thomas Huot-Marchand. By extension, the private press movement initiated by William Morris and Emery Walker at the end of the nineteenth century in England, revived some of those typefaces before they were once more largely forgotten.Įssays by Olivier Deloignon, Riccardo Olocco, Martina Meier, Nikolaus Weichselbaumer & Mathias Seuret, Dan Reynolds, Christopher Burke, Ferdinand Ulrich, Rafael Ribas & Alexis Faudot, Jérôme Knebusch. From that point, we can follow a wide variety of developments, partly related to the travels of early printers from the Rhine area to Italy and France. In 1459 in Mainz, Johann Fust and Peter Schöffer printed the Rationale Divinorum Officiorum by Guillaume Durand, using a typeface (now known as ‘Durandus’) that looked like no other before.
The relatively understudied period – after Gutenberg and before the consolidation of Jenson’s model – extends from the earliest traces of ‘humanistic’ tendencies to ‘pure’ roman type, including many cases of uncertain or experimental design, voluntary hybridisation and proto- or archaic roman. The book brings together researchers from the fields of typography, palaeography and incunabula studies, with a particular focus on type and letterforms. Awarded by Most Beautiful German Books Shortlist 2021. Co-publication Atelier National de Recherche Typographique. Conference papers & exhibition catalogue. Gotico-Antiqua, proto-roman, hybrid, 15th-century types between gothic and roman.