Concerning the Mutilation of Typography

By Cody in Constructive Criticism, Design, Commentary

Say, just as a hypothetical situation, that you’re writing a book on phonological analysis. Since the entire book deals with the investigation of representations of human articulatory gestures, a good design tip might be to set the book in a type that actually includes the entire inventory of necessary IPA glyphs. It’s not like such fonts don’t exist — Adobe alone, in fact, has two: ITC Stone Phonetic Standard (in both a serif and sans-serif) and Times Phonetic Standard.

I really can’t deconstruct this design tip into constituent axioms any further than by simply stating it as I have done. It seems self-evident — like that stuff in the Preamble of the Constitution.

But, apparently, it’s not, because someone decided to set the entirety of just such a book with two completely different typefaces — mixing them not only within the same line, but within the same words.

All the IPA symbols that don’t exist in the book’s predominant face are set in a totally different face. The offending characters jump off the page at you in a jarring and discomforting way, because they have a variable stroke width while the dominant typeface has a uniform one, serifs where the principal face has none, a humanist axis in contrast to the other’s rationalist one, and even an x-height inconsistent with that of the main face. Bringhurst is turning over in his grave (and he’s not even dead). The guilty party here is whoever designed Introducing Phonology by David Odden. (Just in case you had any doubt, Tschichold’s golden canon of page construction unfortunately was lost on him, too.)

This example is a good cautionary tale for many things. One, perhaps, is the importance of not coming up to your own solutions to problems that are already solved. Not only does the designer’s solution look awful, but it certainly wasn’t an expedient one. A quick Google search for an IPA typeface would have taken far less time than manually setting each IPA character in a different face. (Unless, of course, the designer did something even more cringe-inducing, like editing the font the book uses to include the glyphs of the secondary IPA font.)

Another is that a designer should really always start designing with the constraints of the particular problem in mind. A textbook on linguistics requires IPA symbols; therefore, the choice of typefaces—ceteris paribus—is constrained from the beginning to those which meet that requirement. Rather than pick a typeface on some other basis, without regard for the salient constraint, and then coming up with a hack to sidestep the inevitable problem, it would have been by far preferable to choose a face first that works best for the context of the design application in which it will be used.