Typefaces – so what’s the point?

Why choosing the right typeface for your communications is vitally important.

When it comes to design, there are certain rules that you break at your peril. Generally speaking, nobody likes small images. When I worked in newspaper design, I learned a simple rule: “If you have a good picture, use it big. If you have a bad picture, use it big anyway.” I also learned that specific ratios of height and length work better than others because they are more aesthetically pleasing. As a general rule, a little under 3:2 works best. If you want to know why, look here. You will find out about something called the Golden Ratio.

If you’re looking for something more dramatic in your designs, be bold in your proportions but use this device sparingly, or it loses its impact. And just as nature abhors a vacuum, all good designers know that square images simply don’t work.

When it comes to type – less is more. Just because we can now choose from thousands of typefaces, it doesn’t mean that we should. Thanks to the wonders of digitisation we now have more typefaces to choose from than ever before. What’s more, they come in an infinite variety of sizes. But once upon a time they didn’t. We worked with a small collection of fonts and a limited set of sizes in a type family, and we were all the better for it – designers and readers.

What’s a point?

The key to all this lay in the arithmetical wonders of the point system. Type size was measured by the depth the face occupied on the page. Instead of working in inches printers and designers divided inches into points – and there were 72 points (more or less exactly) to the inch. So if a font occupied an inch in depth on a page it was 72 points in size. Simple eh? Well, up to a point. To make matters even more interesting (and more complicated) most of the names were pronounced differently from the way they were spelled. The sizing went like this:

Point size	Name
3 pts	Minikin
4 pts	Brilliant
5 pts	Pearl
5.5 pts	Ruby
6 pts	Nonpareille (pronounced ‘Nonprul’)
7 pts	Minion
8 pts	Brevier (pronounced ‘Bruhveer’)
9 pts	Bourgeois (pronounced ‘Burjoyce”)
10 pts	Long Primer (pronounced ‘Primmer’)
12 pts	Pica (rhymes with Biker)

The space around the type is important to the way we read. Setting one line of type bang on top of the other would result in unreadable copy. To add space between the lines of copy, the printer inserted strips of lead. That’s why we call the space between lines of type ‘leading,’ pronounced to rhyme with heading, not reading.

The point (if you see what I mean) about using these standardised sizes lay in the magic of the number 72. Given that the type was set with what we would call zero leading i.e. 8pt type on an 8pt body, 9pt on 9 and so on, the arithmetic of type was elementary. One line of 72 pt was an inch deep – as were two lines of 36pt, three of 24pt, four of 18pt, six of 12pt, seven of 10pt (more or less), eight of 9pt, nine of eight-point and so on – all the way down to 24 lines of Minikin. And the reason for the importance of all this was that in the days of hot metal typecasting; it was a good idea if you knew how much space your story would take up on a page.

All of which was fine when everyone worked in inches. Trying to convert points to the metric system (as many publications did before the advent of computers) made as much sense as ordering 472 millilitres of beer when you wanted a pint. Unfortunately, as a country, we have never got our heads around the idea of standardisation. Today we buy our fuel in litres but calculate fuel consumption in miles per gallon. In the UK, tabloid newspapers also (bizarrely) measure warm days in Fahrenheit and cold days in Centigrade – because it’s more dramatic that way. Prime minister Boris Johnson may be serious about reintroducing imperial measures alongside metric ones, but for most people, it will seem irrelevant and confusing.

Even more delightfully, the French and the Americans used different names for most of the old type sizes and no one agreed on the size of a point anyway. Then the French took to sizing type in millimetres. It took the introduction of what was originally called Desk Top Printing in the 1980s for everyone to standardise the points system.

Web design, working in pixel sizes, is far more logical but lacks the romantic appeal of names like Long Primer, Ruby and Nonpareil.

Why didn’t printers just use numbers instead of names in the first place? Why not just call Minkin (3pt) “The Small Print’? Perhaps there is just a bit of poetry in all of us – even grimy, ink-stained printers.

It’s not just printing where inconsistencies abound. For decades, golf clubs weren’t classified by number (one through nine for irons, for example). They were known by obscure and delightful names such as brassies, jiggers, mashies, niblicks, cleeks, spoons and baffies. Even now, the sport gets by with an illogical mixture of numbers and names. Driver and putter have been retained, some irons are numbered but others are named (lob wedge, for example).