Fungible Convictions

I’m finally getting around to reading Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America (I feel like the only person whose read more Joseph Roth than Philip Roth)(P.S. Thanks, ex-employer, for the free book!). I’m a couple chapter in but keep getting distracted—in the way only the very dorkiest of us do—by how lovely the text’s typeface is.

In fact, it distracted me so much that I kept taking breaks to look online at different types’ glyphs to figure out exactly what typeface designer Robert Overholtzer chose. If you want to guess yourself, here’s a photo of the top of page 52 from the hardcover (click it for a closeup):

I had to resort to a great site called Identifont, which asks you a series of questions about various letters in the text you’re checking and thereby narrows down the possibilities.

Identifont, in this case, made me feel very self-centered. As it turns out, the reason I love the typeface in The Plot Against America so much is that it’s the same typeface I chose for the “formal report” template at my current employer. Here’s a screen grab of some text, where you can see the same typeface—Minion—as used in the Roth novel:

Click for larger.

Via Lifehacker, this is one of the better introductions to typeface selection, which paradoxically is one of the most asked about, most talked about, but least heeded challenges in blog design.

Many people have asked me about which text type it’s better for a magazine, or a newspaper, or a poster, or a newsletter, or a publication, etc… In general, I give them the solution immediately. But I know that this is not the best answer, because they don’t learn to do this by themselves.

Today, I wont to take a time to analyze how to choose a correct text typography design in different cases. It is very important to understand that those tips are not conclusives, but they can be a good help at the moment of choosing a text type. In any case, it depends on what do you want to transmit with this type, because many times legibility is as much important as the character of the type.

Typography is such a lovely craft. From lines to letters to meaning. And it’s fun. Just look at what a blast typographers have on Typophile.com as they puzzle over the glyph and typeface of a “Type ID Pop Quiz”.

I’m in textbook publishing, and it’s great to see an Open Course initiative, and here’s why: with most of our books, we have to spend a bunch of money (but really, a bunch of time) to create course materials for potential users. Syllabi, answer keys, and just about everything else that students still think every professor actually makes. Open courses, which I guess have been around a while at through MIT’s OpenCourseWare, make a lot of that material free and accessible—boy would that save us textbook people a lot of headaches if that were the norm! Continue reading