Today’s Plan:
- Typography in InDesign
Paragraph Styles
Today we are going to focus on typography in InDesign. Specifically, we are going to work with paragraph styles. In preparation for today, I have asked you to make a paragraph style for the title of works. We will also make a style for author’s name and, time permitting, different styles for poetry and prose works.
Let’s look at the spring 2023 issue by Shellee Schwartz as an example.
Typography Checklist
Font Choice: I have asked you to pair two fonts together. Because this is a print magazine, you have a lot of options here. Traditionally, you would want your body font to be a serif font. Google can certainly help you find a combination or at least some inspiration. Remember that, if you download and install a font into InDesign for your design (which is awesome), you will need to include that font in the final folder you pass in (move it into your copy of the Crucible materials folder). If you need help with downloading and installing a font, then let me know.
Font Size: Typically, print designs use a “points” (pt) rather than “pixels” system (there’s also ems, but I will skip those today). I tend to prefer using pixels, if only because I learned web design before I learned print design. Typically, body font size in a printed literary magazine is 10pt (which would be 13.3 pixels). If you are ambivalent on this, then I would probably use “points.”
I refer to body font above because that gives us a baseline. To figure out how to size other elements, we want to use a modular scale.
Note that different fonts will size differently, and we ultimately want to create something both beautiful and readable. So don’t be afraid to bump your font up to an 11 base if (like in the Schellee example) your base font is really small).
Line-Length: Ultimately, after choosing a font-type and size, we want a line of 45 to 75 (max) characters. Shorter lines can be easily to read; often Crucible designers will use a column format for multi-page prose works to increase readability (remember to keep the gutter between the columns sensible).
Justification: Obviously we want body text to be left-aligned. But should we justify that text? Generally, the answer is no, unless we are working with dense text in smaller columns. I think the rhetorical purpose of a literary magazine should be to read the literature, and thus readability should trump spatial beauty. No justification please.
Leading: Leading is the amount of space we put between lines; generally leading is set between 1.2 and 1.5 times your font-size. So a font-size of 11pt would set the leading to 1.32 to 16.5. One big factor that designers consider is the x-height of a font–the higher the x-height, the more space you generally want between lines.
Orphans, Widows, Runts, and Rivers: I will admit that I just learned the term “runt” this morning while researching orphans and widows and have no idea if it is a real industry term or just something this writer at Herron Printing and Graphics made up. But it works for me.
