Type Crimes & Misdemeanors

Topics

	Color
	Electronic
	Identity
	Makeovers
	Print
	Tutorials
	Type
	Management
	Past Issues

Tutorials

Halftone Border

Create a halftone border in Photoshop.

Halftone Drop Shadow

Add a halftone drop shadow using Photoshop.

Type Crimes & Misdemeanors (cont'd)

1. Wretched rags
Oscar Fernández, associate professor in the Digital Design Department at the University of Cincinnati, recommends that designers go back through the copy after the proofing stage to correct the profiles. Fix odd gaps, funny shapes, and prepositions that can easily be kicked over to the next line.

2. Funky numbers
Larsen’s Todd Nesser wishes designers would use old-style numerals more often. Standard numerals sit on the baseline and are a consistent height, but old-style numerals go up and down. “In body copy, they blend in really nicely,” he says. “If you have regular numbers they kind of stick out.”

3. “Free” costs
When he sees a logo in a typeface like Arial or Verdana, type designer Mark Simonson longs for variety. He wishes that more designers explored the thousands of quality fonts available. “The client probably paid a couple thousand dollars for a logo, and they didn’t even buy a font,” he says.

4. Kerning neglect
Unlike those games in the Sunday paper, you don’t want readers to see words inside of words. Nesser thinks it’s critical to pay attention to spacing, especially the distance between capital and lowercase letters. It’s often an issue for display copy and things like business cards. Fax, for example, shouldn’t look like an F followed by ax.

5. Wrongful fonts
Contemporary titles set in Trajan are annoying to Dave Bull, senior partner at Shift Global. While Trajan, a classically proportioned typeface, might be a good choice for the film Gladiator, too often “it’s used for effect instead of appropriateness,” he says.

6. Criminal quotes
Possibly most abused in the world of type crime is the humble quote mark. Wink’s Richard Boynton says, “The most common violation occurs in logos, surprisingly.” He gets especially exasperated when foot and inch marks take the place of quotes. Frequent accomplice in crime: the apostrophe.