Offtopic: Typography

When people ask me how I made the transition to being a writer, I can only say "it just happened" since I never planned it. I didn't have a job, it was the 2008 downturn, so I started writing a daily blog called EDAgraffiti to give myself something to do and to force myself to keep networking within the EDA and semiconductor industries. In some ways, it was a weird thing to do. I haven't had a lesson in English or writing since I was in my mid-teens. In those days, you took external exams at that age called O-levels. My best grades were mathematics, physics, and biology. My worst grade was English Language. So Computer Science looked like a better subject to study at university than Journalism. Good choice, too! Since I started EDAgraffiti, not many weekdays have gone by where I didn't publish a blog post, at SemiWiki for a few years, and then for the last (nearly) six years at Cadence.

However, there is one aspect of writing that I've been interested in for a long time: typography. I have written about my experiences as a printer in Jobs: Printer, Baker, Chocolatier, Caver and Off-Topic: Picas, Points, and Printing. Well, this is the last day before the Labor Day holiday (Cadence is off on Friday too) so time to go off-topic again.

The two big differences between typefaces are whether they are serif or sans-serif. Serif typefaces (what on computers are incorrectly called fonts) are ones like Times New Roman and Baskerville. Sans-serif fonts are ones like Helvetica and Ariel. Of course, there are other weird typefaces that mimic script (and, of course, Comic Sans which you should never use). Serifs are the little twiddly bits on the letters that make the typeface more readable (see the image if this is new to you).

Of course, all typefaces have to be designed. And so do the rules for layout. For example, Times New Roman was designed for The Times (The London Times, although actually it is just called The Times) in 1931. However, since 2006, The Times has actually used a derivative called Time Modern. The New York Times uses a typeface called Georgia. The typeface used for a newspaper gives it a very distinctive texture. I can see a cutting and tell immediately whether it is The Times or The New York Times or the UK's Daily Telegraph, even though they all use derivatives of the original Times New Roman.

Jan Tschichold

One legendary typeface designer, and designer of print layout, was Jan Tschchold. His book, Die neue Typographie (The New Typography) was published in 1928 but remains a classic. If you read it, then you will never put two spaces after a period for the rest of your life! But he also was a designer of print layout, and wrote another classic The Form of the Book.

The book form that he is most remembered for is his design for Penguin Books. In the late 1940s he lived in England, and oversaw the design of hundreds of paperbacks. Paperbacks of high quality were a new thing and needed a new standard of design to go with them. This resulted in a famous document, Penguin Composition Rules, just four pages long. These rules have been used (or adapted) by many organizations and so have been very influential.

Even though apparently Penguin still considers the rules copyright, they are used in academic courses. For example, here is one copy of them.

Here's the first rule:

All text composition should be as closely word-spaced as possible. As a rule, the spacing should be about a middle space or the thickness of an ‘i’ in the type size used.

Wide spaces should be strictly avoided. Words may be freely broken whenever necessary to avoid wide spacing, as breaking words is less harmful to the appearance of the page than too much space between words.

All major punctuation marks – full point, colon, and semicolon – should be followed by the same spacing as is used throughout the rest of the line.

Note that last sentence: don't put two spaces after a period. Penguin haven't done it since 1947.

Today, these sorts of rules are seen by most of us in corporate identity programs, which is where most print design takes place these days, especially all the rules that every company has about the use of their logo.

Donald Knuth

The next big development in typeface design and layout was using computers. You might think that this all started with the Mac, but the Mac famously debuted in 1984 (remember that commercial...it was only shown once ever). Donald Knuth, the legendary computer scientist, took a couple of years off from writing his master-work The Art of Computer Programming. Between 1977 and 1979, he created the typeface design program Metafont and the document layout system TeX (the "x" is a Greek chi and so is pronounced like the end of "loch" in Scottish or "ich" in German).

Knuth had not been happy with the layout of the first couple of volumes of his book series, done with conventional typography, so in typical computer-science fashion he didn't wait for industry to introduce computers to typesetting, he created an entire system himself. Not just TeX and Metafont, but a family of typefaces called Computer Modern. Tex was a difficult-to-use markup language, but Leslie Lamport produced a clean higher-level language on top of it known as LaTeX. Academics loved it. So now you know why so much academic output looks the same. It is done in LaTeX, not Word or some other WYSIWYG editor.

Some Ugliness in Our Industry

One thing I have railed about for some time is the overuse of uppercase letters in corporate branding. For example, is there anything uglier than GLOBALFOUNDRIES. Well, luckily it thought so too, and in its latest corporate branding uses GlobalFoundries and even a lot of GF.

I'm not too keen on the all-lower-case-letter company names either. The one that comes up a lot in this blog is imec. You need a whole instruction manual (if it's the first word of a sentence, do you give it an "I", for example). And don't get me started on NVIDIA who appear as nVIDIA in its logo but prohibits it in text. At least Cadence and many others don't use their names in all-lower-case except in their logos.

We also have far too many "Hungarian notation" company and product names like PayPal. Even Microsoft, where Hungarian Charles Simonyi worked, is not MicroSoft.

But if you Google around, you'll find other opinions are available.

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