Type & Layout — Are you communicating
or
just making pretty shapes
By Colin Wheildon, with additional material by Geoffrey Heard. Foreword by David Ogilvy. Published by The Worsley Press, Hastings, Victoria, 2005. 175 pages. RRP: $39.95 (pb). ISBN: 1 87575022 3. Available from: http://www.worsleypress.com/type/. Also available on Amazon ($US25.87).
Type & Layout is an unusual book in the craft of typography; it is based on empirical research with average newspaper and magazine readers rather than the opinions and theories of graphic designers.
The research, conducted in Sydney between 1982 and 1990 with two groups comprising up to 500 people in total, examined many elements of typographic design, the basics being:
- The comprehensibility of serif type as opposed to sans serif in body text.
- The comprehensibility of lower case as opposed to capitals in headlines.
- Use of colour in headlines and text.
- The use of ragged setting, either left or right.
- Whether italic body type is difficult or easy to comprehend.
Many other elements were also part of the testing, such as kerning, reverse text, how typographic and graphic elements are presented on a page, ‘widows’ and ‘orphans’, and type sizes — pretty much everything that needs to be taken into account when presenting the written word on the printed page.
Wheildon conducted his study by presenting his subjects with a series of articles typeset in different ways and then testing their comprehension and memory of what they had read. The research program and methodology are well described in the book.
The results of Wheildon’s testing would shame — or more likely infuriate — today’s graphic designers, with plain and simple proving more effective every time over pretty and complex.
Type & Layout is a well researched, comprehensive template of what actually works with the reader and what does not. It contains more than 120 figures and tables to illustrate its results, some of which should be hanging on walls rather than pretending to appeal to readers.
This book should be in the toolkit of any marketer who works in the printed medium — and that is probably all of you. It will provide an in-depth explanation and understanding of typography and layout and help you to speak knowledgeably with your graphic designers. Remember, effective marketing is not about how pretty the printed form looks — it’s about how many people respond to it.
I am not without some criticism of the book; the information is dense and technical and would have benefited from a larger format and more generous layout. It is black and white throughout, forcing all the information on the colour tests to be described rather than experienced. The figures are integral to the text, but there is a great deal of page flipping backwards and forwards to match text and figure. And the front cover goes too far in trying to illustrate its ‘pretty shape’ point (it is all but illegible).
Overall, these are minor criticisms. The value of the book lies in its information and how it was obtained, and I thank Worsley Press for keeping this classic, first published by another source in 1984, in print.
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