Category: Typography

Aptos vs Calibri

Computers & Programming / Media / TypographyOne Comment

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Did you notice the change? Microsoft has made the typeface Aptos the new default for its Office programs, replacing the venerable Calibri after 17 years. Aptos has been rolled out to users since December, 2023, and, at least for me, finally made it to my versions of Office in February. I. like so many others, didn’t notice it right away. I do a lot of my writing online, like this blog, where other typefaces are used. I only twigged onto the change last week when I was working on an older document in MS Word and thought the spacing looked … click below for more ↓

The Book of Knowledge: 2

Books & Reviews / Books about books / Fonts & Layout / Learning & Education / Musings / Personal Reminiscences / Typography2 Comments

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Last post I mentioned I had rescued a set of encyclopedias from the dumpster at the end of this year’s Mother Of All Yard Sales (MOAYS; an Optimist Club event). I didn’t explain what I saved and why, but I’m here to explain, and to show. Bear with me. First, let me give you some personal background. Aside from being a writer, in my career I have been a book editor for a Canadian publisher, a magazine editor for two Canadian magazines, and editor-designer-layout person for two of our local newspapers (including the short-lived Sunday supplement, Huronia Sunday). I have … click below for more ↓

Bring Back the Yogh and the Thorn

Fonts & Layout / Language & Grammar / Typography / Words & etymology / Writing & cursive4 Comments

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Ye Olde Shoppe. We’ve all seen the signs like this. Ever wonder why it says “ye” instead of “the”? Me, too, at least way back then. I’ve known the answer a long time now from decades of reading about English, about typography, Chaucer, and about Middle English orthography. Spoiler alert: It was pronounced “the.” Not “ye.” Sorry to disappoint readers who have been saying “ye” all this time. The “ye” was actually spelled “(thorn)e” — thorn was a letter in the Old and Middle English alphabets that stood for “th.” It started out looking like a lowercase “p” as in … click below for more ↓

Juet’s Journal in Word format

Blog & Blogging / Books & Reviews / England and Britain / History & Biography / My Writing / Personal Reminiscences / Typography / What I'm Reading NowLeave a comment

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For those readers interested in the voyages of the late-16th-early-17th century adventurer, Henry Hudson, or in the European explorations of North America, I have recently scanned and edited a copy of Juet’s Journal into Word format and placed it online here. Here is my website on Henry Hudson, too. I haven’t done much with it of late, but that may be slowly changing as I find I have more time these days, during my recovery. The journal documents how Hudson and his crew ‘discovered’ parts of North America and sailed up the river that now bears his name. For Americans, … click below for more ↓

Books, writers, words, and competencies

Books & Reviews / Media Issues / Typography / What I'm Reading Now / Words & etymologyOne Comment

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I have always believed that any good, competent and credible writer can be judged (if judge people we must, and yet we do) by the books on his or her desk. Yes, books: printed hardcopy, paper and ink. I’ll go into why books are vastly superior to online sources a bit later (although I suspect my readers already know why…). Although I am no longer in the media or much of an active writer these days, I believe I can still determine the craft, the credibility and dedication of a writer simply by a quick glance at their library. That’s … click below for more ↓

The magic of reading

Critical Thinking / Fonts & Layout / Language & Grammar / Typography / Words & etymology / Writing & cursiveOne Comment

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Can you make sense of those lines in the image to the right? Of course not. They’re deconstructed from the letters of a simple, one-syllable word and randomly re-arranged. It’s just four letters, but their component parts are not arranged in the proper order, so they seem like meaningless lines and squiggles. We’ve not been taught to assemble them into a structure that makes sense to our brains. Yet we’re quite capable of assigning meaning and context to abstract forms, if they’re assembled properly. The order that we prefer those lines and curves to be in is arbitrary – the … click below for more ↓

Malory then and now

Books & Reviews / Language & Grammar / Literature / Translations & translating / Typography / What I'm Reading Now / Words & etymologyLeave a comment

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I recently started reading Malory in the original – that is, the language that Caxton printed in. Not the typeface Caxton used, since that would be harder to read, but rendered in a modern serif face. Caxton initially used black letter type (aka gothic) – pretty much all the early printers used it, although each printer had his own dies and styles. However, he did move to a more easily-read, more-rounded typeface by around 1490, a few years after he printed Malory’s book. Still, the early typefaces used in all incunabula take a bit more mental effort to decipher because … click below for more ↓

Square words

Books & Reviews / Fonts & Layout / Language & Grammar / TypographyOne Comment

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Writing has been described as the most significant human invention. We tend to think of inventions as mechanical things, like the wheel, or fire, or the printing press, the airplane, the internal combustion engine or cell phone. But without writing, few of them would exist. Writing allowed us to share the others, to improve them, to record them, to pass them along and record them. Writing allows us to share ideas, emotions, visions, beliefs, stories, poetry and music through a series of abstract squiggles. Without writing there would be no literature, no religion, no philosophy, no songs, no politics. We … click below for more ↓

Back to black

Fonts & Layout / Theme & Coding / TypographyLeave a comment

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I had noticed of late that several websites are more difficult to read, that they opted to use a lighter grey text instead of a more robust black. But it didn’t dawn on me that it wasn’t my aging eyes: this was a trend. That is, until I read an article on Backchannel called “How the Web Became Unreadable.” It’s a good read for anyone interested in typography, design and layout – and not just the Web, but print as well. It makes several good points about contrast including providing some important technical details about how contrast is measured. I’ve … click below for more ↓

Designing Type

Fonts & Layout / Typography / What I'm Reading NowLeave a comment

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Karen Cheng’s 2005  book, Designing Type, is the third of the recent books on typography I have received*. Of the three, it is the most technical, appealing to the typophile and design geek more than the average reader. But it’s also a reference for layout and graphic artists looking to choose a specific font for a work. If your goal is to actually design a typeface, she helps appreciate the subtleties of design that differentiate and separate typefaces and letterforms. But it’s not a book about design. Most books on type and typography focus on the result: working for the combination … click below for more ↓

Frutiger vs Palatino

Books & Reviews / Fonts & Layout / Typography / What I'm Reading Now2 Comments

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In a recent review of Sarah Hyndman’s book, Why Fonts Matter, I casually commented that, You can no more adequately comment on the relevance and impact on the viewer of, say, Frutiger versus Palatino, without discussing the design and layout in which it is set… The point of which was not to single out those two typefaces as much as to suggest the debate between how readers respond to sans-serif and serif faces (respectively). Fruitiger is a modern, humanist sans-serif type designed by Adrian Frutiger in 1975. Palatino is a serif type designed by Hermann Zapf, in 1948, to simulate … click below for more ↓

Reading Letters: Designing for Legibility

Books & Reviews / Language & Grammar / Typography / What I'm Reading NowOne Comment

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The human brain is truly a remarkable machine.* We can see a bunch of lines and in that same brain turn them into an M and know it’s not a V or an N or a K or W. Yet M isn’t a ‘thing’ – it’s an abstract representation of a sound that itself has no concrete meaning outside the Mmmmm of meditation. When you mentally assemble a bunch of other lines and sticks and squiggles, those sounds form a larger abstraction: a word: MOON. Now we have substance. And that can be used to create even larger collections of … click below for more ↓

Why Fonts Matter

Arts / Books & Reviews / Fonts & Layout / Language & Grammar / Marketing / Typography / What I'm Reading Now3 Comments

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The first problem I have when receiving a new book on typography is that I spend far too much time looking up the typefaces described or sampled therein, and searching for them online, instead of reading. Then I start looking at (and critiquing) the typefaces chosen for the book itself. It’s a trees-not-the-forest kind of wonderment that comes over me. As I am wont to do, I sit back on my deck in the evening sun, glass of wine in hand, and a large pile of previously-purchased typography books beside me, so I can make the introductions. Probably not necessary, … click below for more ↓

Uncommunicative again

Collingwood / Council / Ethics and behaviour / Fonts & Layout / Publicity & Communications / Typography2 Comments

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Did you receive your “spring” newsletter from the town? The one delivered on the first day of summer (or later), lacking any actual news… yes, that one. To me it appears as clumsily formatted and poorly written as all the previous issues. Another one that likely wouldn’t even get a passing grade in a high school art class. Since the town continues its race to the bottom of the design barrel, I won’t reiterate all the problems in detail, since they just repeat those already exposed. I’ll just throw in a few comments (read here and here and here for … click below for more ↓

Amateur layout and bad ads. Again.

Collingwood / Ethics and behaviour / Fonts & Layout / Media / Publicity & Communications / Social Order & Disorder / TypographyOne Comment

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I see the Town of Collingwood is still letting the EB layout its full page of ads in the paper.  Tragic. Embarrassing. Cringe-worthy. The latest back page mashup has as its first ad the worst of the worst sort of ad layout, the sort only amateurs would create. It’s too wide for any human being to comfortably and efficiently read. Then there’s the second page with its fat partner in layout crime. It’s embarrassing for a municipality to be thus represented. The only saving grace is that no one reads the EB any more, so not very many people see how bad it … click below for more ↓

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