http://tc.eserver.org/publisher/Upper_and_lowercase_Magazine A listing of works published by Upper and lowercase Magazine in the field of technical communication. en-us Copyright (c) 2005-08 by the EServer. All rights reserved. tclib-editorial@eserver.org (TC Library Editorial Board) webmaster@eserver.org (Geoffrey Sauer) http://tc.eserver.org/images/newlogo.gif http://tc.eserver.org/dir/Upper_and_lowercase_Magazine http://tc.eserver.org/34764.html http://tc.eserver.org/34764.html This PDF is an excellent reference for designers who don’t want to spend a lot of time figuring out whether two or more fonts will work well together. This tool enables designers to choose the perfect typography combination. http://tc.eserver.org/32557.html http://tc.eserver.org/32557.html OpenType fonts often contain a treasure trove of typographic options. Discover some easy ways to enhance your typography by taking advantage of discretionary ligatures, swashes or titling alternates – to name just a few. http://tc.eserver.org/32558.html http://tc.eserver.org/32558.html The history of Helvetica includes a number of twists and turns. There are, in fact, two versions of Helvetica. The first one is the original design, which was created by Max Miedinger and released by Linotype in 1957. And secondly, in 1983, D. Stempel AG, Linotype’s daughter company, released the Neue Helvetica® design, which was a re-working of the 1957 original. http://tc.eserver.org/32559.html http://tc.eserver.org/32559.html Setting professional-looking typography is all about attention to detail. Hyphenation is one of these critical details: what and where to hyphenate, and, in some cases, what not to hyphenate. There are times you don’t want text to break at the end of a line, such as a proper name, a phone number or a URL. But if you leave the choice up to auto-hyphenation, it can happen without your consent. This is when the nonbreaking hyphen comes in handy. A nonbreaking hyphen is not really a hyphen; rather, it is a command not to hyphenate. When placed in front of a word or a group of characters acting as a word, such as a phone number, web address or email address, that word will not be hyphenated. This is helpful not only in text, but also in headlines that you don’t want breaking onto two lines. http://tc.eserver.org/32560.html http://tc.eserver.org/32560.html We previously discussed small caps and the importance of using true-drawn versions rather than computer-generated, “fake” ones. Many of today’s OpenType fonts include true-drawn small caps, making it easier than ever to take advantage of this typographically sophisticated feature, but the OpenType interface in both Adobe® InDesign® CS3 and QuarkXpress® 7 can be a bit confusing. http://tc.eserver.org/32562.html http://tc.eserver.org/32562.html Even with all the technology at the disposal of today’s designers, in the end it’s what the human eye sees that counts. That’s why hung punctuation is one of the skills to master when you’re ready to add professional finesse to your typography. Learn what hung punctuation is and how to achieve it in the leading page layout applications. http://tc.eserver.org/32563.html http://tc.eserver.org/32563.html Typing two spaces after a period is a relic of the typewriter era that has hung around long past its sell-by date. Here’s how to make sure none of those double-space dinosaurs find their way into your typeset work. http://tc.eserver.org/32564.html http://tc.eserver.org/32564.html Automatic, or manual? No, we’re not talking about transmissions - we’re talking about bullet lists, those frequently used tools for organizing lists of information. Your layout application will be happy to format these lists for you, but for true typographic finesse, it’s time to learn to “drive stick” and call your own shots about bullets, alignment and spacing. http://tc.eserver.org/32565.html http://tc.eserver.org/32565.html The Halloween season offers a spookily good excuse to explore the world of scary fonts, but the terror needn’t end there. From media packaging to promotional items, whenever horror, mystery, fear and suspense need to be evoked, scary fonts can sneak up behind your audience and say “boo!” http://tc.eserver.org/32568.html http://tc.eserver.org/32568.html Breaking up isn’t hard to do – just do it right so you don’t lose face. Learn why making the right line breaks in display type is essential for good looks and good sense. http://tc.eserver.org/32569.html http://tc.eserver.org/32569.html Space matters. Word space, that is. Different letter and word shapes call for subtly different amounts of space. Learn to see and finesse word spacing in both text and display type with these how-tos. http://tc.eserver.org/32570.html http://tc.eserver.org/32570.html Comic book writers aren’t the only ones who can use silly, wacky and irreverent fonts. You, too, can give your work a fresh and light-hearted look with one of these fine, fun fonts. http://tc.eserver.org/32571.html http://tc.eserver.org/32571.html The keyboard is rarely the friendliest path to symbols and special characters. Sometimes a bit of menu magic can guide you past the overwhelming Glyph palette. Indeed, the Special Character flyout palette in Adobe InDesign CS3 is a great shortcut to frequently-used characters and will spare your fingers the keyboard contortions. http://tc.eserver.org/32572.html http://tc.eserver.org/32572.html Powerful design software makes many choices available to graphic designers, but just because you can do something doesn’t always mean you should. For example, sometimes it’s a good idea to convert your text layouts to outline, but sometimes it isn’t. Learn more about this occasionally necessary, often ill-advised practice before you decide whether or not it’s time to convert. http://tc.eserver.org/32573.html http://tc.eserver.org/32573.html If there were a “Ten Most Wanted” list for typographic crimes, these hardboiled miscreants would be on it. Learn what the ten worst (and most common) type crimes are, and how to avoid them. http://tc.eserver.org/32574.html http://tc.eserver.org/32574.html Today’s OpenType fonts come equipped with a virtual buffet of numeral styles, but all those choices can be a bit much for your design application to swallow. Here’s a practical guide to help you find your way through the maze of oldstyle, lining, proportional, and tabular, in both InDesign and Quark. http://tc.eserver.org/32575.html http://tc.eserver.org/32575.html Sometimes a simple idea can make a big difference in your work. One recent improvement to major design applications is the addition of glyph palettes. This handy feature will help you find and use the exact character you’re looking for – even if your font has thousands to choose from! http://tc.eserver.org/32576.html http://tc.eserver.org/32576.html Does designing a table of contents drive you dotty? Next time, remember to say “take me to your tab leader.” Learning how to use your application’s automated tab leader function is a great way to save time and keep your layouts looking professional, down to the last detail. http://tc.eserver.org/32577.html http://tc.eserver.org/32577.html Graphic designers love the convenience of today’s computer-created type designs, but too much perfection can get boring. When your eye gets tired of all those flawless, digitally-precise letters, it’s time to explore distressed typefaces. They’re weather-beaten, inconsistent, and utterly, irresistibly human. http://tc.eserver.org/32578.html http://tc.eserver.org/32578.html Are your characters depressed? When punctuation marks are positioned next to ALL CAPS, it can leave them looking a little low. Even making small adjustments in a character’s position will create greater visual balance and give your layout a “lift,” especially in display sizes. http://tc.eserver.org/20448.html http://tc.eserver.org/20448.html One of the lessons I learned at my mother’s knee was that you have to know the rules in order to break them properly. (Mother was a graphic designer.) The rules that are worth breaking are the ones you understand the purpose of – maybe you even agree with that purpose in general. There are plenty of stupid rules for the Web, rules that were put there by people who extrapolated too soon from too small a set of data. Those rules are no fun to break, kind of like removing a tag that says 'Do not remove under penalty of law' from a sofa cushion. We won’t bother with those rules today. Let’s go after the rules worth our time and effort. Given that, here’s my list of Web rules I’d most like to see broken, but only if they’re broken well. http://tc.eserver.org/20443.html http://tc.eserver.org/20443.html In a recent issue of Nature magazine (8 April 1999), lithography rises again, in a new, ultra-high-tech guise! http://tc.eserver.org/20449.html http://tc.eserver.org/20449.html My pith helmet never left my head. The journey took weeks, crossed two major deserts, led through steaming jungles, and ended in a rather dull corporate campus, but it was worth it. I believe I’ve discovered a group of readers who are entirely oblivious to the appearance of a text, who read only content and are frankly blind to the form of the characters they read. In a series of carefully monitored tests, they were able to distinguish serif from sans serif faces less than 40% of the time. They are capable of reading six point all caps Helvetica set on a 50 pica measure without the least hint of complaint or eyestrain. http://tc.eserver.org/20444.html http://tc.eserver.org/20444.html I admit that my intelligence is easily insulted. It’s probably because I’ve got so little of it left – raising a child, running a business, and working in the software industry take their toll, after all – that I’ve got to defend it with the ferocity of a rabid fruit bat. But, as I review the state of the art in desktop publishing software, I’m left with one nagging question: Just exactly how dumb do these guys think I am? http://tc.eserver.org/20445.html http://tc.eserver.org/20445.html There are tiny typographic battles being fought on the Web, from page to page and site to site, skirmishes in a larger conflict between text and links. Like many wars, this one has a thin ideological gloss that obscures a deeper economic and territorial conflict. http://tc.eserver.org/20446.html http://tc.eserver.org/20446.html Typography traditionally thrived on its technical limits. Letterforms reflected material constraints. Typography was part of an ancient, terrific combat with the world’s physical limits. http://tc.eserver.org/20447.html http://tc.eserver.org/20447.html It was advertised as a revolution in typesetting, but, when I first saw it, I thought it was wrong, misguided, and verging on the blasphemous. And I’m usually an open-minded sort. What was it about Adobe TouchType, a now defunct typesetting program for the now defunct NeXT machine, that prompted my feelings of outrage and intolerance? http://tc.eserver.org/20430.html http://tc.eserver.org/20430.html How do you tell one typeface from another? If you’re trying to distinguish Helvetica from Times Roman, the difference is obvious. In other cases, however–especially between text designs having similar characteristics–the differences can be subtle and difficult for the less–experienced eye to see. One important step in training your eye to notice the details that set one design apart from another is to examine the anatomy of the characters that make up our alphabet. http://tc.eserver.org/20425.html http://tc.eserver.org/20425.html Calligraphic fonts resemble elegant handwriting. They often look as if they were drawn with flat-tipped pens or brushes; occasionally, they even include the drips, spots, blotches and irregularities characteristic of hand-drawn letters. http://tc.eserver.org/20433.html http://tc.eserver.org/20433.html Indenting the first line of every paragraph is a habit most of us acquired in grammar school. However, for those daring souls who have always insisted on coloring outside the lines, it’s time to consider using a different style paragraph indent. There are more options than you might have realized! http://tc.eserver.org/20423.html http://tc.eserver.org/20423.html If you love the convenience of creating and printing documents from your computer, but miss the informal, personal touch of handwriting, here’s a handy idea: try a handwriting font. http://tc.eserver.org/20417.html http://tc.eserver.org/20417.html Decisions, decisions, decisions! One of the most challenging aspects of any design project is choosing the typefaces. There are now more than forty thousand fonts on the market and that number is growing daily, which makes the search for the “perfect” typeface only slightly more daunting than looking for that proverbial needle in a haystack. With a little planning, however, you’ll find that selecting appropriate typefaces is far more manageable than it appears. http://tc.eserver.org/20418.html http://tc.eserver.org/20418.html Decisions, decisions, decisions! One of the most challenging aspects of any design project is choosing the typefaces. There are now more than forty thousand fonts on the market and that number is growing daily, which makes the search for the “perfect” typeface only slightly more daunting than looking for that proverbial needle in a haystack. With a little planning, however, you’ll find that selecting appropriate typefaces is far more manageable than it appears. http://tc.eserver.org/20420.html http://tc.eserver.org/20420.html Hyphens, en-dashes and em-dashes are frequently used punctuation marks that are just as frequently misunderstood. All three marks are essentially horizontal lines, though their lengths vary (as do, occasionally, their designs – see figure 1). However, these three different marks have very different purposes, and using a hyphen to do an m-dash’s job is just as much of a punctuation error as using a question mark in place of a comma. http://tc.eserver.org/20434.html http://tc.eserver.org/20434.html Want to get your text off to a great start? Try using initial letters. An initial letter (or initial cap, as they are also called) is an enlarged letter that is used as the first character of a paragraph. It can sit above, below, to the left of, or even behind the body text, and can be set in a contrasting weight, style or color. http://tc.eserver.org/20431.html http://tc.eserver.org/20431.html When it’s time to emphasize a word or phrase, do you automatically reach for the font style menu? Boldface and italics are two of the most common techniques for lending emphasis to text, but these basic typographic tools are often used incorrectly. Here’s how the pros handle text that needs to stand out from the crowd. http://tc.eserver.org/20432.html http://tc.eserver.org/20432.html We’ve all seen newspapers, books, magazine articles and ads which use justified type; that is, type that is flush on both the left and right margins. Used well, justified type can look clean and classy. When it’s carelessly set, however, justified type can make your text look distorted and hard to read. Proper justification is a tricky technique to master, but it’s well worth the effort if high quality, professional-looking typography is your goal. http://tc.eserver.org/20429.html http://tc.eserver.org/20429.html Magazine typography is all about communicating, but magazines communicate in many different ways. One of those ways is through the text, the traditional meat of any publication. Other ways include photography, artwork, suggestive and allusive headlines, cartoons, and even the advertising. All of these require integrating words and images in imaginative ways. http://tc.eserver.org/20422.html http://tc.eserver.org/20422.html Rags, widows and orphans – sounds more like a Dickens novel than type! In spite of their odd names, these concepts are important to understand if good typography is your goal. http://tc.eserver.org/20421.html http://tc.eserver.org/20421.html Register, trademark and copyright symbols are important communicators. They help establish brand identities and protect creative work from theft or plagiarism. Despite their legal and symbolic power, these symbols need to speak softly, typographically speaking. Their tasteful and appropriate use is a small but significant part of good typography. http://tc.eserver.org/20419.html http://tc.eserver.org/20419.html One of the most irritating typographic faux pas is the use of straight quotation marks (also called ‘dumb’ quotes) instead of true typographic quotation marks (‘smart’ or ‘curly’ quotes). How did this dumb-versus-smart muddle begin? Blame the engineers: the standard keyboard layout (which was not created by typographers!) has straight quotes in place of real quotes. As designers, it’s our job to use our ‘smarts’ to work around this all-too-common problem. http://tc.eserver.org/20428.html http://tc.eserver.org/20428.html What makes a typeface look the way it does? The design of the letter shapes is a primary factor, but it’s by no means the only one. The spacing of a font has a large impact on how it looks when set, and should be a consideration when choosing and using a typeface. http://tc.eserver.org/20427.html http://tc.eserver.org/20427.html If the letter spacing and kerning of a font you love is less than perfect, there’s hope: today’s design programs have advanced type manipulation features that allow you to improve the way any font looks 'out of the box.' http://tc.eserver.org/20424.html http://tc.eserver.org/20424.html The more components a brand identity contains, the more onerous it can be. Logo, pictogram, texture, color scheme, wordmark: each must be laboriously created, launched, and cared for, and each of these stages has its own substantial costs. For many companies today, these costs are becoming prohibitive. An increasingly popular alternative is a hard-working, purely typographic wordmark that speaks clearly for the brand, all by itself. http://tc.eserver.org/20415.html http://tc.eserver.org/20415.html Designers are used to being detail-oriented and mathematically precise, nudging things a point this way and a pixel that way until technical perfection is achieved. However, when it comes to typographic alignment, the mathematical approach to design doesn’t apply: it’s all in the eye of the beholder. Visual alignment (also called optical alignment) means exactly that: using that high-tech tool, the human eye, to line up your text until it looks right. http://tc.eserver.org/20409.html http://tc.eserver.org/20409.html Have you ever needed to set an accented character in copy but couldn’t find it on your keyboard? If these characters leave you feeling naïve, you’re not alone. Diacritic characters, as these accented letters are called, are essential to the proper pronunciation and meaning of many foreign words. When you come across an accented letter, don’t assume it can be eliminated without consequence, or you might end up misspelling a person’s name! Accent marks also turn up frequently in foreign-born words and phrases that have become part of common English usage, such as résumé, passé and tête-à-tête. Happily, diacritic characters can be accessed or created with most professional-quality fonts. http://tc.eserver.org/20413.html http://tc.eserver.org/20413.html What kind of a bullet doesn’t travel at high speeds and is completely non-violent? A typographer’s bullet, of course! This very useful typographic element can add emphasis, clarity and visual interest to all kinds of copy. Simply put, a bullet is a large dot used to draw attention to each item in a list or series. The items can be single words, phrases, sentences or paragraphs. Even if you use the bullet that is part of your font, don’t automatically assume it’s the right size: it might need to be altered in scale or position to make it look balanced next to the text. http://tc.eserver.org/20411.html http://tc.eserver.org/20411.html Setting type means selecting and arranging groups of characters, but not all of those characters have to be part of the alphabet. Dingbats are non-typographic elements that can enhance your work by adding variety and functionality. http://tc.eserver.org/20410.html http://tc.eserver.org/20410.html Can you find the fractions on your keyboard? If not, you’re not alone. Believe it or not, there are no designated keystrokes for fractions on a Mac. PCs offer a few (1/4, 1/2, 3/4), but they’re so well-hidden most users can’t find them anyway. Yet fractions appear fairly often in copy, so what’s a person to do? It’s too frustrating by half! http://tc.eserver.org/20406.html http://tc.eserver.org/20406.html What kind of font is best savored one letter at a time? If you guessed an initial font, you’re correct. Often overlooked yet extremely useful, initial fonts are collections of ornamental letters that are designed for individual use. The characters in an initial font are usually too decorative to be legible if set as complete words or sentences, but they’re perfect for setting a single eye-catching letter at the beginning of a sentence, paragraph, article, or chapter. http://tc.eserver.org/20407.html http://tc.eserver.org/20407.html If you’ve ever gone looking 'behind the scenes' in your fonts, you might have stumbled upon a wonderful surprise: a logotype. Logotypes are usually small, commonly used words – such as the, for, and, of and to – that are designed as a unit. Like ligatures, logotypes are treated as a single character by your application (and are usually accessed with one keystroke or keystroke combination). Unlike ligatures, the letters within a logotype are not necessarily connected. In fact, the sky’s the limit when it comes to the design of these useful little words. http://tc.eserver.org/20405.html http://tc.eserver.org/20405.html Are you looking for a way to add flair to a typographic treatment? Try using swash characters. These extremely decorative letters have a flourish or extended stroke at the beginning or the end of the character. They are almost always capitals, and you’ll frequently find one used as an eye-catching initial letter at the beginning of a paragraph, chapter or article. http://tc.eserver.org/20412.html http://tc.eserver.org/20412.html What’s the point of a point system in which 24 points doesn’t always equal 24 points? It’s not pointless, but it does require some explanation! http://tc.eserver.org/20404.html http://tc.eserver.org/20404.html U&lc Online is ITC’s international journal of graphic design and digital media. http://tc.eserver.org/20408.html http://tc.eserver.org/20408.html When setting type, most of us are very conscious of type style, size, width and line spacing. Many of us also pay attention to letter spacing and kerning, even if we’re not as confident in these areas. But word spacing--the space between words--is probably the most neglected of typographic attributes. This seemingly small detail plays an important role in the color, texture and readability of your type.