Letters should “play nicely with each other”

A beautiful old typewriter in the gallery of the
Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication

Tracy Collins, director of the Phoenix Design Studio for The Arizona Republic/Gannett, gave a detailed three-hour presentation on design fundamental.  I’m not alone in adoring newspaper design: a lot of us enjoyed the chance to geek out over fonts this morning, and not just because we were sugared up on all the Krispy Kremes Collins brought for us.

A beautifully designed page can really pull in readers.  I like getting the daily newspaper for all the news it provides, but I love the weekend editions because they tend to pull out all the stops design-wise.  These are the pages I bring in to school on a Monday morning, so we can ooh and aah over some of the more innovative designs, and try to bring some of those elements into our own packages.

Good design is often simple.  It’s often about giving text or pictures room to breathe.  At least for our school, since we have to pay to print the paper ourselves, space is at such a premium that we tend to pack things in.  It was good to be reminded of the power of white space. 

But there was a big part of the lesson that I have to say I never knew about: to never use “off the shelf” spacing.  Between this session and the intermediate/advanced InDesign session, as well as the fact that we’re bumping up from CS3 to CS6, I’m now convinced that we’ve got to set up some templates this summer. 

When we do that, we’ll need to look at our fonts and make sure the tracking, squeezing and leading all work to make the letters “play nicely with each other.”  What a great phrase to describe how letters shouldn’t have too much room between them, but shouldn’t crowd into each other either.  We also need to set our H&J settings appropriately, so we don’t have odd hyphenations and spacings.  There are so many little nuances that I hadn’t thought of before, but I’m sure it’s going to make a difference in the look and feel of our pages.

Finally, I appreciated that Collins cautioned restraint.  “It’s a new tool and ain’t it cool,” he said, imitating a teenager just discovering a new trick in InDesign.  Just because we can do something doesn’t mean we should.  Above all, make sure that text is easily readable, the art tells a story, and the design package is consistent with the message of the story.

Jessica Nassau

Rockville High School

Rockville, Md.