Jewell / Chapter 4

Chapter 4 of Typographic Design: Form and Communication thoroughly dives into the concept of legibility, and presents an interesting conclusion. To begin, I'll comment on just how fluid and relative legibility really is to the current state and priorities of culture. The efficiency and fast-paced mentality of today's society has, of course, defined a unique set of rules for communicating content effectively and efficiently.

The chapter describes letters by having vertical strokes, curved strokes, a combination of both, or by being oblique. Playing off of these classifications, it is also noted that the upper halves of letters are often more distinguished than the bottom halves. Reading, of course, involves much more than this. Word shape and internal patterns – two properties of a more catch-all term, word structure, for overall word composition – as well as interletter spacing (a crucial key to beautiful and legible type) predict how smoothly type can be read.

There is a trinity of spatial harmony: size, line length, and interline spacing/leading. Optically speaking, a reader may be twelve to fourteen inches away from a given page, and the above elements are brought up in the chapter as a means to harmony, relaxation, and balanced content delivery. For example, a font size larger than twelve point may result in a reader taking too long to take in the text – it covers a larger surface area for mastication – but going too much smaller can obviously cause the reader to spend extra time squinting. Similarly, weight and stroke too light or too heavy increases tension, ambiguity, and distraction; type color without enough contrast to background color does not stand out enough for efficient legibility; or alignment with extremely jagged edging will break apart the rhythm.

While on the subject, alignment was given a historical to present timeline. In the 1920's, justification was arguably the most common and it prevented the jagged edge problem. Today, the justified versus unjustified alignment argument is still carrying on, but unjustified has definitely pulled slightly ahead and asymmetrical text is an accepted norm. The fact is, as the chapter insinuates through all of the covered details, legibility is truly a tug of war between creative impact and optical/typographical theory that must be considered when designing or publishing. Balance between the plaintext and the bold, oblique, distorted, or covered means knowing when your message is clear and your content is readable, and when you've gone too far and distorted your very message and readability. As a designer, this chapter reminded me of the basics: what am I saying with my work, and how effective am I at giving the reader something they can understand?

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