I’ve been around type most of my life. When a young boy, I often watched my father create typefaces by hand. He was the consummate calligrapher, and his talents were sought after by firms all over the country. As an established type and logotype designer, his lessons to me remained clear … type is intended to be read, with little to no need for interpretation.

So …. it never ceases to amaze, seeing what a mish-mash the use of type has become. Both print & web pages are seemingly being produced by individuals who use high resolution screens and possess 20/20 vision …. and often fail to use type effectively .

Why Do They Do This …… ?

• Authors who place type on dark, gradient, or bitmapped image text blocks, reversed out in white or other hard to read color (how natural-reading is that?).

• Small type. Please …. many of us have corrective lenses, maybe even bi or tri focals. Small type was originally designed to maximize the use of trees/paper, reduce printing costs, or hide the truth in legal documents. With the speed of the internet and the ability to display vast amounts of text in near-time, virtual page display space is practically free (and saves trees!). Why not use that space effectively with font sizes that can be read by all without the need of a magnifier?

• Choice of typefaces. Using decorative or script typefaces as body copy is laborious to read. They were designed to be used as headlines, not text.

Here’s a good rule of thumb. Small amounts of text copy …. sans-serif faces such as Arial, Trebuchet, Verdana, or Helvetica all work well. Continuous and long stretches of text, Century Schoolbook, Times, and Palatino have proven themselves over the past century as easy-to-read text. Set type in a size that your older readers will have no difficulty reading. Need examples? Look at magazines and books, and see what typefaces those publishers are using. The selected fonts are there for a reason …. maximum legibility.