written June 19th, 2009 · 0 comments

When I read fashion magazines, one of the things that always seems to bug me is when an article discusses specific work of an artist or designer, but they don’t show a coordinating image, so those who are not in the know are totally clueless as to what the author is referring to. Even worse is when there are photographs to refer to, but there are no credits indicating what is what, and it leaves the reader with no idea of whose clothes are being shown! (Honestly, I have not seen this that often, but was shocked to find it in a really well designed fashion magazine.)

Here is what I came across.

The text describes which themes various fashion designers were using for their collections, but unfortunately there is no visual reference (if you aren’t a fashion expert)! I found myself at a loss reading this. The designer could have easily added credits to the images (supposing the images correspond to the designers mentioned in the text), but hey, maybe they just forgot them and they didn’t mean to throw the reader into a whirlwind of confusion! I hope so….but still, very unprofessional.

Here is some lame editing in my opinion.

If you read this, there is actually no point to the text, no mention of exhibition dates, a new book published, I was left wondering ok, and? There isn’t much comment on the artist’s work, just a little blurb about what he may have contributed to the art world. I guess I was particularly dumbfounded because this text fell into the section of the magazine where new events and points of interest were mentioned, and yet, no event mentioned…hmmm. If the text had been written with more fascination in the tone and a feeling that I had to check out this artist’s work at so and so gallery or in this book, or on the web, it would have made more sense to me.

 In this particular magazine, I came across many strange non-uses of punctuation. Here is a kind of list, but many of the sentences listed have no periods at the ends, although there are 2 sentences that end with a question mark or exclamation mark. If I were designing this, I would think, ok this is a list, so either all of the sentences are lacking in punctuation, or all of them have proper punctuation. And if you read closely, most of these sentences are proper sentences, and those which are fragments could be easily reworded to act as a sentence. I think this would be the more reasonable way to go.

I guess I am just looking for a little consistency!

Here is an example of why this stood out to me in the first place. The words ‘End it’ and then no period, is just weird!

 Here are some examples of strange (and I would add ugly) typography.

I mean, besides the fact that no one wants to read text set so randomly and erratically set like this, it is just not beautiful! It looks haphazard and I do not get the feeling that the person who designed these spreads had a good feeling for the flow and the beauty of typography! It makes me sad:(

Below are some examples of some extraordinarily odd typographically set texts. These examples combine typographic mistakes such as negative leading and bad word spacing due to overly narrow columns, and larger issues such as an unattractive combination of type faces and irrelevant fake drop caps.

I think the callouts (the texts in red) are unattractive and hard to read due to the spaciness of the font and the negative (not enough) leading. The leading is obviously not enough, one can see the g’s bumping into the f’s. These callouts have been placed indenting the paragraphs to an extreme. This forces the line lengths of the paragraphs to be unusually short. This does NOT work well when text is justified (and it would be completely different if the text were ragged right). There are too many holes (random word spacing) in the text as a result and the texture of the text is totally destroyed.

These three examples are all from the same magazine and one can really get the sense that there is no underlying grid, which is fine to a certain degree. I would say, one should stick to a grid when you are not capable of making creative typographic decisions without destroying texture and legibility. I think this magazine thought it looked cool. Throwing in a monospaced font with a traditional (i think it’s neoclassical) serif face, but I don’t think the typefaces work well together.

 Here is some more erratic letter and word spacing:

Something about this makes it very hard to read. After looking at the letterforms carefully, I can only assume the designer decreased the letterspacing for whatever unnecessary reason and the word spacing could be increased. Let the letterforms breathe! It is a beautiful font! Don’t massacre it.

 The following are examples of overuse of italics and most definitely not enough letterspacing, although I do not know how much more you can space this text without ruining its texture.  My suggestion would be to use italics in small doses. Italics, or at least not all of them are meant for setting long strings of text, such as in some of the examples below. In my opinion, the charm of the italic is ruined by overuse. In addition, in the first 3 examples you can see the lack of punctuation in the last lines! Why oh why?

Yikes! Who wants to read this?

Well, that is all for now! Sorry about all the lecturing on bad typography, but I feel it is my duty to all of my university typography teachers to express my discontent.  I get especially riled up when I find these mistakes (or poor decisions) in high quality magazines (or at least those I thought were high quality).

Finding such mistakes encourages me to be more professional in terms of my own use of typography and I really want to hone my skills as much as I can in this department. I don’t want to be a designer who can design everything from logos to websites. I want to be an expert in layouts, dealing with typography and images. I hope one day I will get a job where these skills will be valued and I won’t only be asked how many programs I know!