written August 19th, 2009 · 1 comment

Typography! I am back to rant and rave:)

Actually I’d like to begin with a quote that made me think about these blogs posts about typography that I have been writing lately. “Everyone’s a judge and everyone’s the accused” Nancy Updike said on This American Life afew weeks ago. And it sums up my endeavors here quite well. It is easy for me to take a look at a magazine and see right away what I would change about the design and it is quite another thing to avoid those mistakes before or while you are creating something. So I can easily critque and I can easily be the critiqued. Which is a good thing! What would we do without a good hard critique once in a while? It is so important to take a step back every once and a while and look hard at what you are working on and judge.

So, now I can begin.  First off. I found something in a newer version of a magazine I critiqued last time and perhaps they are reading my blog, because they fixed the problem area I was talking about! I had mentioned this list was terribly designed.

before:

now:

Nice improvement!

Next up, something I just cannot stand. This could be personal, but I think it is so cheesy when done, and especially here…curved text blocks around an image. When I find a design with shaped text boxes that is beautiful, I might change my mind!

And now for some really boring layouts. Here is a table of contents that is yaaaawn and with negative letter spacing.

Tsk tsk.

Another one. Not sure where to begin with this. I think just generally I don’t like the typeface. It is obviously designed for the magazine and is supposed to be funky, but the letter I is driving me nuts, cause it looks like a number 1. Just not feeling this layout.

As I am writing this and I am thinking what is the point of a table of contents for a magazine anyway? When you have a huge magazine with lots of articles you definitely have to have one as a reference for the reader. It is useful when one is deciding whether to buy the magazine in a store and they want to glance over the articles and it is useful for after reading through the magazine (although I cannot remember the last time I used the table of contents in a magazine come to think of it). A few things we can agree on for sure is that a table of contents cannot just have the titles of articles listed (this is too abstract), so there has to be a little description. How long or short they are depends on the content and how much you are cramming onto the contents page in the first place. Images are good to have to refer to. I have a very visual memory so I like to have images on the contents page, rather than just article titles. Let’s take a look at some more tables of contents I’ve scanned from my collection of magazines.

Let’s start with the only table of contents that I have read recently (magazine-wise). This is an awesome design magazine I have a subscription to (IdN, International Designers Network) and because I actually read the whole magazine cover to cover (unlike the many fashion magazines I buy) I like to have an overview of the whole magazine before I start reading. The reason this table of contents works well is that there are only 9 sections. They don’t list every single thing in the magazine, but they have the individual articles lumped into sections and on the contents page they have a detailed and informative description of each section (which are not repeated again at the start of the sections)! So there is actually a point to reading the table of contents in this case. Nice design, good hierarchy, maybe some more leading between headers and body text would be nice;)

This is pretty cut and dry. The phrases are not abstract, so one knows what to expect more or less on any given page. Good hierarchy design-wise.

This Elle contents page is good. There are descriptions (could be shorter though) for the main articles and the trivial sections are listed without descriptions below. This allows the page to exist with as little content as possible. The only thing I would change is to decrease the size of the page numbers. They are far too large and should not be bigger than the titles in my opinion. As a reader I would look down the list of titles first. The eyes are searching by content after all not numbers! The page numbers are secondary or tertiary. If the numbers were smaller, there would also be more space between each item, letting the page breathe more.

 GOOD magazine has great design (and content) and this contents page is short and sweet. The second page of the contents deals with the pages of shorter blurbs of info, points of interest and products, and lumps them into sections in a simple way.

Looking at these huge page numbers I may be changing my mind about always having the page numbers smaller than the titles. Hmm, here it works to have the page numbers so large. I think it is because they are SO large. But here is my version. Is it just a matter of taste? Which looks better? Hard to say…

There is so much here I am not sure who would read it. Too bad I don’t know that much Polish otherwise I could say for sure whether I would read this.

For me, this is way way way too much. I like how the section headers are designed (News, Mode…) and the placement of the page numbers in relation to the titles and descriptions, but by time you get to the second page of the contents…its far too much. In this instance it might suffice to only list the titles of each individual interview, since they are all the same thing, all portraits.

The next example is from Nylon magazine and I am sad that there is no hierarchy being used:( Hierarchy is fun! It is the whole point of graphic design. Breaking the text into varying degrees of importance and allowing one to read with ease, to scan the text quickly or to just drool over the beautiful setting of text:)

I came across this in W magazine and I wasn’t quite sure if it was the contents page at all. This is not necessarily bad, but then what’s the point? I generally think the text here should be larger. My eyes are overwhelmed by the small typesize and density of info. Especially when the magazine is so large (proportion of typesize to magazine size should be taken into account)! This issue was 10.5 x 16 inches (26.5 x 35.5 cm). Oh and this is a scan of only half of the page.

 This is a pretty lame table of contents…one I probably would not ever read. Useful? I think not. Descriptions here would have been nice to add interest.

 Basic, basic…kinda boring…kinda cool. I would just change one thing. Give the page numbers a different look. Different weight or size or face.

 This page below works. I like the design a lot. It is structured with a nice grid and grounded by the images. This magazine (The Electronic Beats Magazine) always has decent design. No frills or fancy stuff, just a few good typefaces and good type setting. Nice!

Ah Martha Stewart…ah RISD graduates…ah good design…I picked this up in Poland.

 I love this contents page. It could be a personal thing, but I love mixing typefaces and colored faces together, whether it is actual color or black color (weight of the type) and this layout does it so sweetly. Personally I would have increased the type size of the words Fashion and Words, increased their letter spacing (I almost always do this when using all caps) and increased the leading between them and the list of contents. See 3rd image for my version.

closeup:

 And last but not least, the table of content pages that don’t say much, but are visually expressive.

 This is utterly useless! But hey, if you want to waste 4 pages of paper, go right ahead! Your paying:)

Well, I kind of got side tracked here with the contents pages. I guess I’ll finish this post later!