Type Workshop 04

Carrying on from the final exercise of last weeks workshop, progress today was centered around spanning an entire page of text across columns and experimenting with readability in layout.

The first task was more of a warm up to refresh the memory. It did however show how line breaks can provide the deception that there is less text on a page.

Original:
Alteration:
After playing around with type and a single column alone, the logical progression was to experiment with more columns and to add in an image; thus working toward the realms of page design and layout. Again the focus was on the readability of the type... weight, point size and Co. all being crucial as before - especially the number of words per line. Not to mention line breaks!

Two Column:
Text was aligned to the left, point size and leading adjusted accordingly as to give an 8-12 word per line average... Text wrapping is awfully awkward in InDesign. I'll get the hang of it soon I hope.

Three Column:
Same as before here, type aligned to the left and all the same precautions were made to achieve a readable average word per line count. I'm not too keen on the image positioning, but as that is a layout issue I won't go into detail.

Four Column:Heading into the depths of a four column grid, I was forced to drop the point size slightly as to fit all of the text on neatly alongside the image. My main mistake here was substituting readability for aesthetics, a valuable lesson learned! As you can see the average word per line count is bordering four to five. Much, much too low.

Five Column:
The five column grid however, was where the real lesson was learned. Due the document size and greater number of columns, the logical thing to do was to reduce the point size and leading further. The problem arose though in the same ways as before. Not enough words per line to read comfortably and fluently. Cue Grahams words of wisdom... Revert back to spanning text across multiple columns. HOW OBVIOUS. The result is shown below:
In addressing the problem this way the text is much more readable across two sets of two columns for a number of reasons. Most primarily, the fact that a greater column width allows for more words on a line means that the point size can be increased for an easier and more fluid read. Genius.

Other lessons learnt:

- Leading should be 20% larger than point size. i.e 10pt on 12, 16pt on 19.

-The name for white space that runs through text is called a WIDOW.

- An indent is usually three characters in size.

- ALWAYS print to check readability. Just because it works on screen doesn't mean that it is going to work for print.

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