By: Sir Khalid Rehman
Layouts and Fonts
Fonts have great impact on the overall professionalism of a magazine conveys. Too many font faces is visually confusing to the reader. Too much varied stuff can be tiring on the eyes too.
- It is always good to use only one to two font families--one for the headlines and subheads, one for the body text.
- Research shows that serif fonts, especially small ones, are easier to read than san-serif fonts. The eye tracks across the serifs of the letters making reading easier.
- ALL CAPS are difficult to read. For emphasis using italics or bold is a good alternative to using CAPS.
- Stretching/compressing fonts on your desktop publishing set-up makes them awkward (watch for the dot above 'i' which gets distorted when the font is extended or condensed artificially). It is always better to use the extended or condensed version of that font or even another font family.
Multi-column Layouts
Magazines and newspapers use a multi-column grid for page layout. Measure their length and width and note them for reference.
Using one column across the page makes the lines unreadable because reader’s eye has difficulty following end of one line to the beginning of the next line. That is why regular sized magazines use three columns and digest-sized magazines use two. Not only does it look more professional but text will flow better on the page and you will have more options for placing photos.
White spaces look good
Stuffing as much as you can onto a page is visually overwhelming to the reader.
Although it can be difficult, but leaving some areas of the page blank make text and picture portions more attractive. Experiment with leaving some column white space in your multi-column layout. Run text in one of the columns only with a photo or graph covering the other two columns. Try starting your article halfway down the page with the top half being reserved for a photo. Experiment with layouts.
Never on the edge
Layouts with text too close to the edge of the page appear stuffed. Never try to fill up the entire space. At least ¼-inch margin is suggested but ½ inch or even more will look even better. It looks more professional to add more white space.
Fonts and typefaces
A font is an especially designed set of characters. It is the combination of typeface and design characteristics such as size, pitch and spacing.
The height of characters in a font is measured in points. Each point is 1/72 of an inch.
The width is measured by pitch, which refers to how many characters can fit in an inch. Common pitch values are 10 and 12. A font is said to be fixed pitch if every character has the same width (as in an old typewriter). If the widths vary depending on the shape of the character, it is called a proportional font.
Font Families
A font family is a group of fonts that have similarities in design. One member of the font family may be bold, while another member of the same family may be italic (these characteristics are also referred to as font style). Families are generally grouped into categories based on design specifications such as serifs, fonts that resemble handwriting, or even its proportional spacing. The five generic font families consist of fonts in the categories of serif, sans-serif, cursive, fantasy and monospace. There are other font families such as Times, Script, Arial and Courier to name but a few of the more popular families.
The term font is often used as a synonym for typeface, which is not technically correct. For example, some may refer to Times Roman as a font, but it is actually a typeface that defines the shape of each character. Within the Times Roman typeface there are many fonts to choose from — different sizes and styles (italic, bold and so on).
If you have the Times New Roman typeface installed on your computer, then you can make it most any size — from tiny to huge, italic or bold. Where the terms font and typeface, by definition, mean two different things, the capability to manipulate a typeface so easily on the computer means the two terms are often used as interchangeable terms now.
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