Type casting: tips to make your typography more readable.

Nobody likes rules—except maybe school teachers, the Marquess of Queensberry, and some guy named Robert. Plus every mom on earth.

So it’s not surprising that graphic designers—those free-spirited folks who make your brochures and websites look so spiffy—are offended by typographical rules. Therefore let’s not call these rules. Instead, let’s call them guidelines. Or helpful advice. Or typographical tips to enhance legibility and make your marketing communications more effective. In short, let’s call them the type of thing that can be helpful.

Get it? Type of thing?

Okay. Let’s skip the weak jokes and concentrate on a few practical realities about typography in marketing communications.


	Practical reality #1: Every authority says reverse type is hard to read. However, graphic designers say reverse type can make your brochure sing like a coloratura on steroids. So what’s a conscientious marcom executive to do when asked to approve a layout with reverse type? At Harding Marketing, we try to follow a few simple guidelines:

Keep it short. Reverse is generally not a good idea for body copy, but it can work just fine for headlines or short captions.
Use strong, bold faces. There is a place for delicate, arty type, but that place is not in reverse.
Make it big. Small type sometimes works okay in reverse. But most times, big type works even better.
Finally, if we’re using reverse type over a four-color photo, we make sure to do (a) and (b) and (c). And even then, it’s risky. That’s because the slightest problem with color registration can make reverse type as blurry as memories of your fourth birthday.

Practical reality #2: Big type is easier to read than small type. We realize that’s not a totally helpful tip. Like, how big is big enough if your copy will sometimes pop up on a 10″ mini notebook screen and sometimes on a monster 27″ monitor? But we still think it’s important to consider whether or not your words might be more effective in larger type.

BTW, trying to follow this advice often encourages us to cut copy, which is nearly always a good thing.

Practical reality #3: Too many characters per line is a bummer. How many characters are too many? Various authorities offer various opinions, with no firm answer. At Harding, our own guideline for readability says there should be no more than 90 characters per line, including spaces.

Of course, you could ignore the previous two guidelines and try to cram nearly 130 characters into a single line. It’s up to you—and your ophthalmologist.

Practical reality #4: When you print type over a black and white photograph (or almost any pattern), whole words can disappear in a haze of nearly identical values. One protection is to use outline letters. That way, even if black type winds up over a very dark background, the white outline will make the words legible. If you’re printing in reverse, the opposite is true; giving your white letters a black outline will help the words show up.

PRACTICAL REALITY #5: ALL CAPS MIGHT BE EVEN HARDER TO READ THAN REVERSE. AT HARDING, WHEN WE WANT TO SET COPY IN ALL CAPS (LIKE WHEN WE’RE TRYING FOR THE WESTERN-UNION LOOK), WE FOLLOW THE SAME GUIDELINE WE FOLLOW FOR REVERSE TYPE: KEEP IT SHORT.

Practical reality # 6: When your words are going global, there are special issues to think about. For one, copy translated from English can run up to 40% longer in other languages. I took a walk, for example, becomes, Ich habe einen Spaziergang machen when it ambles into Germany. Maybe even worse, a beautiful design using Latin letters (like these) might not work as well in the Cyrillic, Greek, Sanskrit, Kanji, Arabic, or other alphabets.

Unfortunately, there are also practical realities numbers 7 through maybe 1,027. But this blog is too short to include them all, and you’re too busy to read them anyhow. So let’s just end by saying that we’d be delighted to discuss typography with you at any time. And if that leads to the opportunity to set some legible, attractive, and persuasive type for your next marcom project, even better.

To set up a conversation, just open your email and type in michelle_contreras@hardingmarketing.com. Or to reach our office in Grenoble, France, try stephane_labartino@hardingmarketing.com. They’re the type who’ll respond almost instantly.

By Chuck Gardner
Staff Writer