ThinkCreation » typography

Creating Faux Bold with Strokes: the Catch

Elisabetta Bruno — Mon, 04 Jun 2007 09:57:09 +0000

Many of you probably know that if you don’t have the bold or italics version of a font installed in your system, you shouldn’t use your DTP application’s option to make it bold or italics, because that will simply result in a simulation which might work on screen or with a desktop printer, but that can cause problems once your file is sent to an external printer using a RIP.

A solution to this can be adding a border around type. Applications such as Illustrator, Corel Draw, InDesign and others allow you to do that. However there is a catch, which I discovered not long ago while working a my company’s logo (that I didn’t design).

When I was first hired by this company I was told that sometimes the logo looks thinner than it should. They had asked the designer to make it bolder when it was designed, so he added a stroke around the text since he had no bold version of the font (Andale Mono). The text in the logo is outlined by the way. Despite this the logo often just looked thinner than it should have.

One day I was making some tags for a packaging project and I used the logo. Since the tags were small, I had to shrink the logo. I made my PDF, did my preflight checks in Adobe Acrobat Professional and no matter what I did I kept getting an error about a stroke being less than 0.25 pt. For those who don’t know, printing a stroke or a line that is less wide than 0.25 pt often will not print because it’s too thin. Finally I figured out that the stroke was around the logo. In the original file, since the logo is bigger, the stroke is wider than 1pt, but once the logo is resized it becomes a hairline, thus being ignored by the printers’ RIP once it goes to press. That was why the logo was thinner sometimes. It wasn’t the designer taking “artistic license” it was just a technical problem.

Moral of the story: don’t use faux bold or italics, and when you use a stroke around text to simulate the bold version make sure you keep in mind how the design, logo, whatever you are doing may be used in the future. If the logo/graphic will be made very small, then try not to use strokes around text as it may not be printed.

Typography Upside Down

Elisabetta Bruno — Sun, 05 Feb 2006 23:38:05 +0000

Actually I am talking about kerning. There’s a great typography tip on Prepressology on how to kern letters:

Kerning can be a tricky part of dealing with typography. Recently a fellow designer shared a method she uses and I thought it was really clever. Trying to deal with kerning can sometimes be a bit frustrating but this little tip can take some of that frustration away.

Flip the text 180 degrees. Yes, thatâ€™s it!

I advise you read the rest of the article, because it will turn very useful.

Technorati Tags: typography, desktop publishing

Tip O’ the Day: Open Type Fonts Are Cross Platform

Elisabetta Bruno — Wed, 01 Feb 2006 15:48:51 +0000

As techonology advanced, PCs have quickly caught up with Macs. A designer can do his job on both platforms with the same amount of effort.

I have heard many times the myth that Macs cannot read files created by a Windows program and vice versa. That might have been true some time ago, but it is no longer. Files created by a Windows application can be opened by the same application run on a Mac. When going from Mac to PC, it is often necessary to add a file extension, as Mac software usually doesn’t append it at the end of a file nameâ€”that’s about it. There are other minor differences, but they’re easy to outdo.

The main problem remains fonts. Usually fonts used on a platform won’t work with the other one. Sometimes there are problems even using Mac OS X fonts on a Mac OS 9 platform. Luckily there are exceptions:

Open Type fonts are cross platform. You can use them both with Windows and Mac OS X without problems.
Mac OS X handles also Windows True Type fonts, yet this doesn’t work in reverse.

If you know your job will be dealt with by another designer using another OS, remember this and you’ll save you both a lot of pain.

[tag]Mac OS, Machintosh, fonts, type Windows, PC, Mac[/tags]

Comic Sans Must Die

Elisabetta Bruno — Tue, 24 Jan 2006 23:59:19 +0000

Professional designers will tell you that Comic Sans is used and abused just as much as Times New Roman. Some of them have sworn by their life they will never use Comic Sans. But is it right to kill a font like this, without interrogation or due justice procedures to find out its uses?

Samuel John Klein at Designorati:Typography brings to light an excellent explanation from Comic Sans designer, Vincent Connare.

Now, please, don’t use Rotisan for comic books, will you?

Technorati Tags: typography, fonts, comic sans