Tag Archives: typography

La linéale géométrique dans un labyrinthe étranger

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A typical 19th century French galerie... or is it?

Ikoku Meiro no Croisée, or La croisée dans un labyrinthe étranger, was a pleasant surprise and one of my favourite shows this season. Even though Junichi Sato is only doing series composition, it still feels like Aria. We have girls leaving their homes to go to a strange foreign land and learn about it, set to classy music. All we have to do is trade MANHOME for Japan, Space-Venice for Paris, 23rd century for 19th century, and strings for clarinets.

But there was one thing that caught my eye and has bugged me ever since.

Why does this text on my window look so round?

Now, I’m not a graphic design student or anything. I just think typography is cool, so please bear with me as I play amateur type historian. I’m also not that confident in my ability to identify typefaces on the spot. I’m relying heavily on Linotype’s excellent sans serif history articles and Robert Bringhurst’s excellent The Elements of Typographic Style for more general stuff. I’ve been using a combination of Identifont and FontBook to attempt to identify stuff. Anyhow, I expect I will say some wrong things.

A few months ago, I got the chance to read through some type history for a paper. While most of it was on neoclassical type, which was late 1700s/early 1800s, I did skim through 19th and 20th century stuff. Armed with that knowledge, I thought it was a bit weird seeing stores with sans serif signage in general. But other than the problem of sans serifs possibly existing before they were created, they just felt wrong because they looked too “new”. Croisée is set some time in the second half of the 19th century and a quick search revealed that the earliest sans serif faces showed up early in the 19th century but didn’t get big until almost 100 years later.

An attempted reproduction of the above

So I’m pretty sure this is Futura. If it’s not, it’s definitely a geometric sans serif. And as it turns out, geometric sans serifs are products of the early 20th century, with Futura being created in the 1920s. Geometric faces are born from attempts to form idealized letterforms out of circles and lines, coming out of the whole Constructivist movement. It’s a pretty huge contrast to anything from the Romantic era, which is why it look so strange hiding among all of the old shops in the Galerie.

Definitely not Arial

Here, we have what appears to be Helvetica, that venerable Swiss typeface that is used everywhere nowadays, from subway signage to being slapped on photos on tumblr. Or, at least, I’m pretty sure it’s Helvetica, based on the G. The problem is that Helvetica was created in the 1950s. Of course, that’s not a lot of letters to go by and it could be one of Helvetica’s ancestors, but the earliest of those seems to have appeared in the 1880s or 1890s at the earliest. These typefaces, called Grotesques, were pretty popular in Germany, but didn’t catch on elsewhere until the 20th century. This might make its appearance in Paris a little strange, although I’m not sure of the exact timeline.

The lowercase letters were especially helpful

On this cart, we have a gothic sans serif. Gothics are a British creation from the late 19th century and early 20th century. These are recognizable as the ones that show up in old-timey newspaper headlines. Again, I’m not sure about the exact timeline so I’m not sure how it propagated in Europe, but they were pretty popular in the States. However, it’s my understanding that very few gothics were drawn before 1900.

It was annoying trying to take screens with this lady in the way

Finally, here’s what appears to be a humanist sans serif, based on the R and the C. Humanists are supposed to resemble writing more than the mechanical construction of geometrics or grotesques, but it’s hard to tell from just the capital letters. And again, since there aren’t too many letters to go by, it could turn out to be something else, but I don’t recall seeing anything that resembles that C when going through the other early 20th century typefaces. Anyhow, I feel like that could’ve come straight off of a Windows 7 screen or something.

What other typographical shenanigans are hiding on those storefronts?

I focused on sans serif typefaces because they’re relatively easy to pick out and differentiate between. I’m not pro enough to be able to distinguish between serifed fonts yet. But, this little exercise makes me wonder if there isn’t any typographical weirdness lurking among the signage set in serif faces.

I got started on this entire thing because I remembered Mark Simonson writing about the fonts on the maps in the Indiana Jones movies. I actually didn’t think about it until that Le Papillon d’Or sign caught my eye and made me go ‘waaaaaaait a second’. It’s the first time I remember doing that for anime, probably because most of the time, the signs are in Japanese. I guess the fact that it’s trying to present an accurate historical depiction of Paris also creates a sort of uncanny valley effect and things that would normally get passed over start to pop out.

Anyway, everyone should watch this show, because clarinets and cheese and baguettes and 19th century weeaboos and Yuneeeeeeeeee.

Designing Worship Slides: Type

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Last time we were looking at worship slides, I talked about colour, which was a fairly simple place to start. Now, we move into something more substantial. We’ll be looking at type. In order to understand the importance of type, you need to understand typography.

Typography is the art and techniques of type design, modifying type glyphs, and arranging type. Type glyphs (characters) are created and modified using a variety of illustration techniques. The arrangement of type is the selection of typefaces, point size, line length, leading (line spacing) and letter spacing.

When I explain type, most people immediately think of fonts. The selection of a proper font to set your worship slides in is one of the most important decisions you have to make. Different fonts have different character and communicate different things. Good type selection will help add to the atmosphere that the worship leader is trying to create. Poor type selection will distract the congregation.

While type involves far more than font selection, it’ll be the focus of this post. Depending on your computer situation, you may have access to a variety of fonts, but likely only a few are suitable for use in worship slides. We will be looking mainly at the Microsoft core fonts for the web in detail, but we’ll also take a quick look at the new Cleartype fonts and other nice fonts in future posts.

The web core fonts were released by Microsoft in 1996 and are guaranteed to be on pretty much any computer. These fonts are Andale Mono, Arial, Comic Sans, Courier New, Georgia, Impact, Times New Roman, Trebuchet, Verdana, and Webdings. That is quite a few fonts and chances are that Office will have unloaded about ten times as many fonts for you to choose from. We need a way to eliminate some of these right off the bat.

Remember our goals. Our choice of typeface needs to be easy to read. Immediately, Webdings is out, or at least I’d hope so. But, there are other criteria that we need to look at in order to narrow our options. We’re going to be reading song lyrics, so we’re not going to be using monospaced fonts like Andale Mono or Courier New. While they may be excellent for coding, they are horrid for regular reading, are too mechanical, and take up too much screen space. Following the same train of thought, Impact is disqualified because it is also not meant for body text.

But all of those choices above were fairly clear and obvious. We’re now left with the fonts that most people think are fine for use in worship, sometimes to my disappointment. Much of the time, this is because we forget that fonts have character, and that the font should match the context of whatever the words and music are trying to communicate. It is because of this that I cringe every time I see someone decide to set worship slides in Comic Sans.

But, we’ll begin with high school favourite Times New Roman. This actually isn’t that common of a font to use among people who’ve done slides for a while for the reason that it’s the font most associated with word processing and assignments. It is a decent font for print. On the screen, it isn’t horrid, but it’s not ideal. However, the main reason why Times New Roman is distracting is because of it’s association with work. This is especially true for student fellowships. We definitely don’t want to be reminded of that assignment we have due on Monday and we definitely don’t want to be causing these things to surface while we worship.

Comic Sans should not be a part of this group of fonts, but too many people use it. Understanding why Comic Sans, and any other font, is not appropriate requires us to understand the background of the font. Comic Sans was designed for use in children’s software and was modeled after comic book type. Practically, the fact that it was not designed as a general typeface means that it is a poor choice for setting body type. But more importantly, the informal character of the font conflicts with the context of our worship.

Trebuchet is a font that has been used liberally on the Internet, most notably as the choice of many blogging templates. While it’s not that great for body text on the web, it is adequate for use in larger sizes. It is a friendlier sans serif and much warmer than Arial is without being silly like Comic Sans. It isn’t ridiculously large like Verdana is either. Trebuchet is typically my font choice when there isn’t much on whatever machine I’m using.

Georgia is God’s gift to typography on the web. It is a serif font designed for being read on the screen. It is a very good font and an excellent replacement for Times New Roman for any document that’s meant to be read on screen. When it’s printed, it looks a bit large, but it does fine if you’re wanting to mix it up a bit. But if you need a serif font for those serious worship sets, you cannot go wrong with Georgia.

Verdana also sees a lot of usage on the web. This is because it’s ridiculously large size makes it really easy to read at small sizes. It’s not a bad sans serif, but it doesn’t fit our needs because we’ll displaying text at large sizes. Unfortunately, Verdana at large sizes is unpleasantly large and blocky.

Arial seems to be an inexplicably popular choice and I don’t understand why. The big thing about Arial seems to be it’s legibility and neutrality. What else would you want in a font? I don’t know, how about some emotion? Again, remember that we’re designing worship slides and we want the character of the fonts that we choose to be consistent with the content of the words. Choosing Arial works against our goal because it tries to be neutral when worship is supposed to make us anything but neutral. This is not to mention that Arial is a poorly designed font. At large sizes, it looks ridiculously empty and barren, which, again, is not consistent with our worship.

Simply going through the basic fonts just now has shown us a few things. You don’t need to amass a collection of premium type to create decent worship slides. However, it does require a lot of thought to choose the right type. But more importantly, this means that there is absolutely no reason to settle for slides with sub-par type. Even though we’ve only gone through a handful of fonts, you should be able to apply the same reasoning to choose appropriate fonts.

Also realize that the fact that most people don’t notice these things does not give us a license to typeset slides without thought. Again, approach the slides with the same attitude as you would a musician on worship team. Just because people can’t hear that you’re playing sloppily doesn’t give you a reason to. Many of these things about type usually go unnoticed consciously, but people can usually tell if something is off. It’s our job to make sure nothing’s off.