Wayward typography…

Visible ink traps and a fill font

The headlines in the well-designed entertainment section of our local paper are set in a font which was specifically created for use in small sizes on newsprint. The ink traps are distinctly visible. Ink traps keep the inside corners of letterforms from rounding out due to ink gain. Ink fills the “trap” instead of oozing into the negative space inside the letter. I don’t know if the example is Bell Centennial Bold Listing, or another font, but it was definitely designed for the yellow pages or newspaper classifieds. The Eureka Reporter is the only publication I’ve seen that “misuses” a font in this way.

On the other hand, a widespread recent fad has been the use of Adobe’s Rosewood Fill in advertisements. Rosewood is an ornate carnivalesque decorative font, which has an accompanying “fill” font that, when placed behind Rosewood, provides a fill color. Rosewood Fill on its own has a crude, pleasantly rough-hewn appearance that says, “this message is so important, that our headline didn’t have a chance to shave and put its pants on.”

Update: Kevin Bell, Design Director of The Eureka Reporter, informs us that the font in question is Retina which was originally designed by Hoefler & Frere-Jones for The Wall Street Journal.

Make mine curly…

Quotation marks: they’re used to enclose direct speech and quotations. In most programs, the keyboard will give you double primes, which are used to mark inches. Graphic design programs default to typographic or “curly” quotes. In Britain they are called inverted commas.

According to the Oxford Companion to the English Language, “Double marks are traditionally associated with American printing practice and single marks with British practice”

In the Renaissance, quotes were marked by italics, but typographers first cut quotation marks in the mid-16th century, and by the early 17th century quotation marks were common.

The French and Italian custom prefers guillemets. Quotes are opened with left-facing double guillemets, and closed with right-facing double guillemets (e.g. «I prefer primes,» said the typewriter repairman).

As with the apostrophe, many English speakers (especially sign painters) are befuddled by the the rules which govern the use of quotation marks.

Just remember, quotes are used for direct attribution, not for emphasis.