This week’s lecture centred on Typography and how to use typography effectively to tell our narrative. We looked at typography at the page level, the importance of choosing a suitable font for body copy, measure, leading, pairing fonts and the important details to get correct in typography (such as when to use quotations and when to use primes). We also looked at using a set typescale for headings (H1 to H6) and using different font weights or italics to emphasise content.
For this week I needed to select a couple of suitable typefaces for my project as well as decide on what pieces of the supplied content I was going to use and begin the markup process.
Body copy will make up the vast majority of my content for this project, in fact it makes up the vast majority of all web content. For this reason selecting a typeface that is suitable for my body copy is a key decision. Body copy has a lot to do, it carries your narrative within the words, so it needs to be readable but, it also must be flexible with an italic version and multiple weights to allow you to emphasise different keywords or quotes to help the narrative. Body copy is not a time for display typefaces that look great and have real character but are hard and tiring to read, we need to make reading pleasurable if we want users to follow our story.
I looked at these two articles to get some ideas for how to select my body copy typeface.
Both of these articles pointed out a wide-range of features that could be looked at to determine whether a typeface would be suitable for body copy. Considerations like stroke contrast, x-height, optical sizes and the white space within the letters. It is easiest to see the differences within typefaces when they are compared beside each other so when I find some suitable typefaces this is the method I will use to compare them and make the best choice for my project.
Another interesting point I picked up in these articles was looking at what the typeface was originally designed for, often typefaces were designed for a specific project such as Times New Roman for The Times newspaper or Frutiger for the signage at Paris Airport. Looking at typefaces designed for body copy or designed in the period I am looking at for my style (60s and early 70s) could help me find a typeface that evokes the feeling I am aiming for.
One thing that is harder to describe in words is the rhythm of a typeface when set in body copy, but it is easy to determine if it is right or wrong when you see it visually, that is why for choosing my typeface I am going to select a number of possibilities and then set some of my actual content in each typeface to judge the rhythm and readability to help me make the right choice.
My first port of call for selecting typefaces was NASA’s own Graphics Standards manual which I am fortunate to have a digital version of. In this NASA sets out four typefaces and how to use them. These are:
I am able to access all of these bar Helvetica, (where I will use an alternative) and these will provide a starting point for my search. I don’t feel these will be my final font choices as even NASA admits some shortcomings especially with Futura’s small size and x-height so an alternative selection may be wise with the huge selection of fonts I have access to. However, as a baseline to judge other fonts against I feel these four will do a great job.
I found Nimbus Sans as my Helvetica substitute, so here are some sample type samples in each typeface.