Hey, keep it down…

I’ll get straight to the point here: all caps should hardly ever be used in text and bold should never be used. Never, ever. If you want to emphasize something, use italics. You’ll end up with a more polished-looking finished product.

Graphic designers who have access to extended font sets (I don’t on this blog, so please use your imagination), use small caps for common abbreviations (like 11:00 AM), initialisms (e.g.: TV or UFO) and proper acronyms (UNESCO or NATO). Well set type rarely includes all caps beyond two-letter geographical initialisms (Mexico, D.F. or Washington D.C.) or proper name initialisms (RFK or MLK).

The temptation to use theatrical typography is widespread with so many common folks now having access to so many typestyles, but as the great typographer Robert Bringhurst says, “most writing and typography remain contentedly abstract.” In other words, writing does not communicate more successfully if it is accompanied by bold, all caps, and exciting fonts.

Whither Palatino?

Graphic designers have punished Hermann Zapf’s beautiful 1948 design, Palatino, for over a decade by avoiding it. Its crime? Ubiquity. It was everywhere after the desktop publishing revolution put it into the hands of the hoi polloi in the late 1980s. It’s time to forgive. Palatino is a gorgeous, robust font. It shouldn’t suffer because of indiscriminate licensing, or promiscuous distribution.

The greatest weakness of Palatino is, perhaps, its clunky ampersand. Mr. Zapf more than made up for it though, with the lively, energetic italic ampersand. Substitute the italic ampersand for the roman, and you’ve got instant elegance.

Latin: it’s all Greek to me…

A device graphic designers employ when they’re working on a layout that includes blocks of text, is greeking. It can be accomplished by simply sketching horizontal lines with a pencil, or, with the advent of design software, by dropping indecipherable paragraphs into text boxes. Many designers call the placeholder text Lorem Ipsum, because these are the first two words of the most commonly used greeking text.

There are alternatives. You might consider using the colorful hillbilly greeking text, or perhaps hypertext will suit your next design project.