5 months ago
Monday, February 4, 2008
Concerning the Mutilation of Typography
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.
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an actual linguistics student
Tuesday, June 10, 2008
4:37 am
I’m using the book right now. The author sometimes switches from APA to IPA and it gets a little annoying, but christ whats the big deal? Im going to ignore the fact that you dont know anything about the standards within phonological notation, but Odden uses APA for the most part. The Adobe font you were talking about is not a standard font for linguists, and obviously isn’t a standard APA font. They chose a font based on the academic community they are a part of, not based on the one you are a part of.
Cody Robbins
Tuesday, June 10, 2008
11:03 am
I do in fact know a thing or two about phonology — I have a master’s degree in linguistics. Don’t even get me started on the fact that Odden uses APA — it’s like a member of the physics community using the imperial system to present their findings rather than the metric system. And the fact that he switches back and forth between APA and IPA is maddening, especially considering this is an introductory textbook on the subject, and that kind of confusion is exactly what I would think you wouldn’t want to obscure the material with. You’re right, however, that he primarily uses APA in the book. But same problem exists for both his IPA and APA transcriptions, and I only mentioned IPA because it’s what he should be using for the whole book anyways.
Why does it matter? Because it’s jarring and it’s astoundingly poor design. The running text should be in the same typeface, and therefore a book using IPA (or APA) should use a face that includes the full complement of necessary glyphs. This isn’t really an indictment of Dr. Odden (although he should perhaps have noticed it), but rather whoever typeset the book.
I’m puzzled why you say ITC Stone Phonetic obviously isn’t a “standard” APA font. Quite to the contrary it is obviously a phonetic font — that is exactly what it was designed for. It includes the full inventory of glyphs necessary for both IPA and APA transcriptions, which is exactly why it is a good choice for a book like this.
I assume you’re referring to the sickening practice so endemic in the linguistics community of forwarding around Word documents when you mentioned that ITC Stone Phonetic Standard isn’t a “standard” font for linguists? If you were forwarding a Word document, then, yes, you would want to use something like Doulos SIL. (But the need for a “standard” typeface is exactly why people shouldn’t forward around Word documents.) The point is, though, that in this book they did not choose a typeface based on the community they are a part of — they used a stupid hack that makes their book look awful, regardless of which community the reader is in.