As a designer, this is an issue that is near and dear to my heart. I want all of you to go to Typography for Lawyers and study it.

Sooner or later you will need to submit text for something—your resume/cover letter, the menu for your restaurant, the sign on your door, a grant proposal, that ad you’re running in the Stranger—and then you (yes, even YOU) will need to understand how to make typography work for you.

Please help the sanity of designers and type-nerds everywhere.

And don’t use Comic Sans.

56 replies on “Typography for Everyone”

  2. I used to hate Dom Casual. Somehow all the life of those great sign painter hand made letters was squeezed out of the font. But I’d live in a world of only Dom Casual if I never had to see Comic Sans again.

  4. I disagree; I think Comic Sans should be mandatory on all legal documents. 18 point. The only emphasis allowed should be bold underlined. Every sentence must end in a smiley.

  6. @1 Actually serifs help the reader to follow the line of text. San serif fonts are ok for very small text (like phone books/listings) but for articles and the like serif is the way to go.

    @3, I’ma smack you.

  8. I find it very difficult to get excited about the minutia of typography. Sure, sure, font choice is important. But, I just don’t believe that anybody other than a very small number of “designers and type-nerds” actually cares about whether you put two spaces after a sentence or one. As long as you’re consistent.

    Also, this guy acts like a straight quote once strangled his puppy.

  11. @7 I can’t disagree. The world would be a better place if we all appreciated the expertise others have and paid them to do it. DIY is cheaper, but it shows.

  12. I see documents and copy every day that are double-spaced to begin each sentence. No one younger than 35 should have been taught this, and yet—I mean, indenting the first sentence of a paragraph is cute and sometimes ok and always easily reconcilable, but double-spacing is just… and to explain it to someone—suddenly a co-worker is staring at me like they didn’t get that Gary Gnu pronouncing the “guh” in his name WAS the joke.

    Run-on sentences, ironically, don’t bother me.

  13. @8 You don’t need to care about minutia, but you should care about readability. And that’s what the site is about, making things as readable as possible.

  14. His advice to avoid operating system fonts isn’t wise for people sharing documents between computers. Maybe courtroom documents have only one writer, but legal documents usually see a lot of back-and-forth during their revision process. Sticking to common fonts, like Times New Roman, is a good idea in these cases.

  15. @14 Totally agree.

    In other instances where no one needs to edit the document but you, making a PDF is a good way to make sure your document looks the same from computer to computer. It’s my understanding that Word and other programs allow you to export as a PDF now. (Design programs definitely do.)

  16. @14, that’s what .pdf files are for.

    I am a lawyer and I use Plantagenet Cherokee for letters and Hoefler Text for my briefs (I do criminal appeals.) My letterhead is in Colonna MT. Gorgeous fonts.

    Times New Roman is boring as heck.

  19. I definitely get the importance of readability. And making things understandable as well — I am something of a stickler for using things like bullets and bold paragraph breaks, to help people with short attention spans digest the main points.

    I just don’t get the hatred for the double space. I really don’t see it as interfering with readability (with most fonts — I guess with some fonts the double space could be distracting). When I read something I don’t care one way or the other whether there are two or one spaces, I just care whether it is consistent.

    BTW, I am 31 and was taught to double space (not that I would advocate one way or the other, but that’s what I was taught). I was also taught to put a comma before an “and” in a list (e.g., Mary’s favorite fonts are Comic Sans, Times New Roman, and Arial).

  20. #16 – It sounds like you’re the primary author of your documents. What would you do if another legal team wanted to rewrite or contribute to your document, perhaps entire paragraphs? PDF’s are great, but Word’s “track changes” function is much better suited for the sort of thing I mean.

  23. 1. Double spacing after the end of a sentence is great. It provides a visual distinction between a sentence and a fragment, and law has tons of fragments. Cf. this, id. that, etc.

    Int’l Shoe v. Washington and 987 P. 42 …. there’s just tons of abreviations. Those periods don’t get an extra space after but periods ending a sentence should to help distinguish.

    2. some lawyers are still just stuck on courier and not even kerned (proportionately spaced) yuck.

    3. All documents are passed around quite a lot and using condensed or nonstandard fonts as the link seems to suggest would not be a good idea. Also, you don’t want a judge thinking “huh, that’s a funny font” you want the judge thinking only about the case.

    3. TNR rocks, you know, there’s a reason they invented serifs….it’s more readable…..the little feetsies help you distinguish the letters.

    No shit.

    And Arial just screams “High Lites” magazine and informality.

    It’s a fucking court of law, dress it up a bit. You don’t wear your sandals and socks to court and you shouldn’t chop off your serifs either.

    Look Slog uses sans serif, you think court should be the same?

  24. @17 No.

    @19, Yes I was taught both those things. I’m 36 and was one of the last classes in my high school to learn typing on actual typewriters. The former is just a legibility thing, the latter seems (in my experience) to be a style issue depending on the publication. I believe both are correct, but perhaps no comma before “and” is preferred? Any copywriters want to weigh in on that? (Also you can add Papyrus and Sand to my favorite fonts list. Not.)

  25. I’m also a lawyer (since 1977) and I switched to Arial some time ago because it seems easier for me to read. Initially I thought it was too “casual” but it seems to have caught on and I see it quite a bit now.

    I always double space between sentences – just seems right to me. And when I get something in a font I don’t like, I just “control A” the whole damn thing over to Arial.

    This actually looks like an interesting site to me. I’ll bookmark it and go back for more detail.

    By the way “metadata” in documents is the big thing for lawyers now…. causing quite a stir!

  27. Mary – you’re right that the comma thing is a style, or a “rules of punctuation thing”. I’m under the impression that using the comma is no longer something that kids are taught to do. But, my personal opinion is that it’s necessary in lists that consist of phrases (where a pause helps you digest the list). I don’t care as much if it’s a list of one-word items. When I’m editing other people’s work, though, I usually only correct for consistency, because I know there’s disagreement on the issue…

  28. @20, if I had to collaborate on a document I wouldn’t worry about the font used in the drafts. I’d reformat it before I printed it, though. It’s not hard to change a font.

  29. Personally I prefer my commas dripping wet with ink, large and in charge. But then, font is a personal thing, and we all have different preferences.

  30. @19, @24, @27: that comma is called the Oxford comma and is the subject of perennial dispute. It comes down to preference, unless you are writing professionally to a standard style book (AP or Chicago), in which case you do what you are told. I use it probably 3/4 of the time, depending on whether it makes the list of things clearer or not.

  31. @25 – I don’t see a double space after the end of your first sentence. I’m guessing the comment ingester strips it out. Lets. See.

    Yep. Way to let people express themselves typographically, Slog!

  38. The double-space was used universally up until World War II. Remember that type was set in lead at that time, and lead was much more useful for other things (bullets, for instance). Someone whose name has long been forgotten had the bright idea to eliminate one of the two spaces, and it’s been that way ever since.

  39. @31: HTML automatically treats any number of spaces as just one, unless you put in an explicit nonbreaking space ( ). It’s keeping the two-spacers down!

    (I personally like LaTeX’s more-than-one-but-less-than-two-wide spacing between sentences, but that’s a little excessive for most things.)

  40. @30 The comma can also change the meaning of list. Say you were writing a will and you gave all your money to Zombie Lincoln, Squidward, Billy Dee Williams and Silly Dee Williams. Without the comma the Court could see Billy Dee and Silly Dee as one unit, so each of them would have to split a share rather than getting a full share of the estate. Including the comma can have serious ramifications

  41. Everyone should use whatever fonts and spacing they want. If you use Papyrus on your business card, I know at a glance that you don’t sweat the details and I need to find a different lawyer. There’s something to be said about giving people enough rope.

  42. @38, the double space was NEVER used in linotype or any other typesetting. You will never find it in old books or newspapers, for instance. It is purely a relic of typewriters, because of the monospaced font. The notion that the double space was used to save lead for bullets is ridiculous on the face of it.

  44. Read a paragraph of dense text on a laptop with single spacing, then again with double spacing and tell me which one is more easily parsable.

    Double spacing FTW. Fatality.

  45. This is awesome, I’m so glad there’s so many of you willing to talk at length on typography… Prepare for more type/design posts from me. Also this is my first Slog post to break into the “most commented”. *sniff* I love you guys!

  47. @1: I’m not taking typographic advice from anyone who calls it “san serif.” (It’s sans serif; sans is French for without).

    And almost every type expert agrees that long documents are easier to read in a serif font. There’s a reason that virtually every magazine, newspaper and book is in serif type.

  48. @46 I actually like Georgia, back in old HTML land when you needed to use fonts on your page that most users had, it was a fave of mine. I still think it’s pretty, if generic. I could see where it’s not appropriate in legal docs, since the numbers descend below the baseline.

  50. @42: I would have thought that as well, and I was just in the process of typing a post about how he’s full of shit, but then I decided to check my textbooks from the ’30s. I’ll be damned. Every one of them uses the double space.

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