You’re not my Type

The last 4th of December, 2008, was a different day for designers in Almería: we had a conference and round table discussion on typography coinciding with an exhibition organized by the New York Type Directors Club at the Almería School of Art. The speakers were Silvia Segarra, Paco Fernández, Luis Reyes and Eugenio Jiménez, all of them members of the AAD (Asociación Andaluza de Diseñadores - Andalusian Designers Association), and the subsequent round table had Miguel Ángel Martín as the moderator.

During his speech, the eloquent Paco Fernández got the audience to like him immediately thanks to a brief dissertation against the much despised Comic Sans font, during which grunts of disapproval could be heard from the audience (disapproval toward the very Comic Sans, that is). He continued providing five recommendations for a better use of typography. It’s worth remembering two of them here:

1. Dashes.

Hyphen & en-dash: they’re used to divide words that break at the end of a line, and to connect parts of compound words.

Em-dash: it has the same length as the letter “m” (thus the name). It’s chiefly used in fragments of dialogue. There is even a bigger dash, equivalent to three en-dashes; their usage depends on the style manual you use.

2. Italic, cursive, skewed (fake italic).

“Italic” and “cursive” is not the same thing. An italic font has a slight slant to the right, whereas a cursive font is one written in a single stroke, similar to hand writing, and without a separation between characters. Skewed fonts are an artificial feature of software packages like Word, that turn a normal into a fake italic, by applying a slant to the right; this is to be avoided because it alters the true aspect of the font; using the italic version, if available, is much more advisable.

And now, some images from the exhibition: