Finer Points in the Spacing & Arrangement of Type

by Geoffrey Dowding

When Stanley Morison wrote in First Principles of Typography that “Typography does not so much need Inspiration or Revival as Investigation.” he may well have had Geoffrey Dowding in mind. Few people investigate, dissect and care about type with the passion and intensity of Dowding. He probes into every aspect & use of type and space, from word and letter arrangement to the design of type itself. He’s readable, absorbing and provocative; no matter how you feel about Geoffrey Dowding’s opinions, you will never approach design in quite the same way after having read Finer Points in the Spacing and Arrangement of Type. If you care about design and the printed word, then you care about what Geoffrey Dowding has to say.

During his long typographic career, Geoffrey Dowding was typographer to a number of British publishers and agencies. He also served as an instructor in typographic design at the London College of Printing for over twenty years.

Genres: Design, Art

Paperback

First published January 1, 1954

Reviews

[H James]

This slim book is the most succinct and efficient primer to the goals and methods of typesetter zealots who prioritize page color over all else, including legibility. Dowding’s prescriptions are absurd. He wildly overcompensates in almost any adjustment he recommends. If a he looks at two lines of text and deems one line too far to the left, he will invariably overshoot and place it too far to the right. If he looks at the space between a period and a capital T and finds it too loose, he will remove the space entirely (for example.This is literally what he advocates). Nevertheless, the problems he attempts to solve are worth being aware of, and his resistance to tangents and diatribes makes this text unique within those expounding his strain of thinking.

[Gabino]

We who are of a certain age who discovered "desktop publishing" after the advent of typesetting computers (or even later) take so much of type layout for granted. There is a button to increase the space between the letters (kerning), another button to increase or decrease the space between lines of text (leading), but no buttons to design or think for you. This book, first published in 1954, is a much-needed primer on page layout, kerning, spacing, and other minutae of design that we far too often abandon to the discretion of the page layout program we´re using.

The first eye-opening statement is that the typesetter (or page designer) has control over the width of the space between words and this is one of the most important methods of controlling pace and ease of reading. The smaller that space between words, the easier for the eye to move to the next word and the less likely there will be a snaking river of whitespace for the eye to accidentally detour.

The pace of this book is slow. If it were published today these type suggestions would be an appendix in some other book, all the advice sliced down to a few bullets of "design guidelines." The tempo of the book allows time for reflection on the importance of typesetting, allows time for interesting asides and full-page examples. Every couple pages offers a revelation that you probably hadn´t thought of. The leisurely pace of the book gives you time to soak it in.

With the click of a button (or the pulling down of a menu) in most page layout programs (like Quark XPress or InDesign), the modern designer can set the first letter of a paragraph much larger and dropped into the text. Such programs have so many good presettings for dropped capitals that it doesn´t seem like the page designer needs to supply additional thought, and that unflinching acceptance of what the machine spits out is the reason for so much mediocrity in page design. It was true also in Dowding´s era. The mediocre typesetter would just plunk the type pieces on the line as quickly as possible. His advice was to slow down, think about the spacing, and if necessary choose a different font size or leading than what speed might dictate. "The eye," he quotes, "is the sovereign ruler of taste."

Ligatures, ampersands, hyphenation, punctuation. Alignment, titling, italicizing. All the principles and tools of page layout you need to deploy to make your pages more legible and attractive. Most software today does all this for you with breathtaking ease, and we´re so coddled by it that the necessity to sometimes centre a line of text by "eye" seems like excessive hardship. The computer program takes care of matters like hyphenation at the end of a line, knows all the rules for breaking words, but the more you understand the underlying system the more effective a designer you´ll be.

Evidence that this attention to detail is out of style: this book is available at Cole´s during their sidewalk sale for $1.99, if you can find it. Even at its regular price of $20 it´s certainly worth studying.

oringinally written in 2004 and posted at moteinteractive.com