Research Point: Magazine typefaces

Research Point: Magazine typefaces (Graphic Design 1 pg. 97)

Go through the print material you have collected and divide it into ones that look easy to read immediately and those that don’t. Is this due to the typefaces used, the way the type is laid out – the number of words per line and the column width, or its alignment?

Work out from your examples what the designers have done to make things more legible and readable.

I can see that this activity could easily become a bit of an obsession! It was fascinating to note how fast I made the decision about what I felt was easily readable and worked well for me. It wasn’t until I started measuring and analysing the characteristics of the pages that I realised how much sits behind that almost instantaneous decision. I looked at a wide variety of print materials from the “Lakeland” catalogue and “Your Cat,” to “Time Magazine” and the “British Journal of Photography” (BJP) on the basis that this would give me some very different house styles to consider.

As I started deconstructing the layout I was very aware that my needs in terms of legibility and readability may not be the same as everyone else’s. I wear varifocal glasses and have a slight astigmatism in my left eye; for the most part I take my glasses off when I’m reading but that is dependent on type size.

In the end I analysed eight pages from six magazines, ranging from those I thought were quite legible and readable to examples I found very difficult to read. Rather than try and do everything on the computer I photocopied the pages that I wanted to look at and marked them up by hand. I was then able to scan them and add them to my learning log.

In order of preference in terms of my ability to read them, from best to worst, the articles are:

1. A Tale of Two Hermiones: Time Magazine
2. A Changing Nature: Your Cat
3. In Print Lotus: BJP
4. Labour of Love: Good Housekeeping
5. The Mood: Elle Magazine
6. Video: People Management
7. You don’t want to alarm anyone…: People Management
8. Experience: Elle Magazine

The first two were very close and I was surprised at choosing a justified text as this is usually harder to read. I think the centred headings and use of white space is probably what worked for me. It is a very simple layout, which is something I have taken note of.

I was also slightly surprised with ‘Your Cat’ because it is the only one I looked at that has four columns. I was attracted by the quite informal header typeface, and the San-serif body text with no more than six or seven words per line I found very easy to read. I think this was helped by the ragged, rather than justified edge. Overall, the tone set by the typeface seemed causal and friendly.

The BJP has used three equal width columns with a serif text and a bold sub header. My critique of this design would be that the typeface is a little small for me, but that may be expected as the emphasis seems to be more on the photographs than the text.

The Good Housekeeping page I just find really messy and I’m not sure where my eyes want to go. It uses six colours, mixed cases, regular, italic and bold typeface. It feels like the whole toolkit has been thrown at it. The serif typeface with ragged edge is reasonably clear to read but the overall design put me off reading.

Elle Magazine’s ‘The Mood’ uses a more limited typeface range and has more coherence than the Good Housekeeping page but it is too small for me to read comfortably, which I find off putting particularly because all the paragraphs run together without any space between them. The tone of the typography feels quite formal and probably aimed at a readership that I am not part of.

Both the People Management pages look overloaded to me. There is so much going on I am inclined to just flick past them. I think it has not long been redesigned to a smaller format, which I suspect was intended to make it look more contemporary. The heavy solid lines on “You don’t,” and the mix of colours and symbols and text on “Video” make the typefaces leap about on the page for me. The typeface on “Video” is also too small.

Again it was a close decision but Elle Magazine’s “Experience” is the least successful from my perspective. Small dense serif text, uneven column widths, justified text, narrow side margins all make this page very unappealing and something I am unlikely to read. The designer has used indents and the large capital “M” in an attempt to break things up but I don’t find it effective.

This was a really useful activity in terms of thinking about my own work. It has highlighted for me that I have a preference for a simple clear typographic layout but that I shouldn’t rule things out too quickly – like using justified text – as there seem to be ways to make it work in terms of readability and legibility. I was surprised to see the extent of the variation within each of the magazines in terms of design. Most seem to stick to two to three typefaces but these can have different formats, type sizes and colours.