BonFX

Legibility is another area where the designer can be misled by what seems like an obvious dictate in type selection and design. There can be no question about the readability of the message, but legibilty and readability are not quite the same — a dull and uninteresting presentation in a highly legible typeface will not be widely read. There have been many studies of comparative legibility, and each study seems to surface with slightly different conclusions. For the designer, the best solution is to use his material in such a way that it arouses interest and invites reading.

—Allen Hurlburt, Layout: The Design of the Printed Page

 

“Designing text is the process of selecting a typeface, deciding which words or phrases should be emphasized, and determining how the type should be arranged on a page. The final design will be influenced by the copy you work with, the intended audience, your understanding of the principles of typography, and consideration of how we read. This holds true whether your goal is to make the experience of reading as comfortable as possible or to challenge accepted typographic conventions.”

—James Craig, Designing with Type

“One of the things I have observed, looking back historically, is how elegant a seventeenth-century book looks. One of the reasons it looks so elegant is because of the restrictions: there was only one typeface available, there weren’t that many fonts, and virtually all you could do was play with sizes, italics, and so forth.”

—Colin Forbes

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“The objective of Typographic design is to organize all of the elements of communication into a harmonious and unified whole, either by achieving a quiet uniformity of similar elements or by the visually exciting use of contrasting ones. What determines the result is the way in which the diverse elements are organized in relation to each other, the contributions each makes to form, texture, and weight, and the effect of their relation with the space in which they exist.”

-Carl Dair, Design with Type