Cabinet

What do I do?—Part One

One of my responsibilities at work is to maintain a bi-monthly newsletter. It’s not much, just two A4 spreads for each issue. The catch is that it must be released in four languages in addition to English. The languages are Spanish, French, German, and Italian. Not speaking any of them doesn’t help, but I’ve picked up a fair amount of each in my time here so that I can at least get the gist of what’s in front of me. Doing what I do, there are some potential nightmares when dealing with different languages in a fairly rigid layout. I spent the past year working with the existing layout to understand the nuances of each language and how much wiggle room I have in altering the leading, tracking, font sizes, etc. In an ideal world, I would simply copy and paste a translation into the corresponding text box and it would fit perfectly, creating a work that is equal in my original intention in every way but the language. Some people (my sister) think this is how it works. I’m about to tell you otherwise, and hopefully in the process, expand your appreciation for the printed word. Or at least me. Appreciate me more.

I begin by sending out a request to the contributors to send me an article. For about a month, I harass them with reminders of the due date, with increasing frequency towards the final week—much like the work of a bill collector I imagine. Once I receive them all (about 4-5 depending on the issue), I send them to a proof-reader to make sure all of the i’s are dotted and t’s are crossed. Then I have about a week to work on other, always urgent, pending work. The articles come back to me in perfect English, and I experience an increased desire to drink until intoxication every single night.

Even with a pre-designed layout, I can expect to spend a good four or five hours playing with the text. First I like to adjust the tracking (space between words), eliminate the widows (single words that drop to the next paragraph), rivers (wide white vertical lines running down a column of text), and inappropriately hyphenated words or phrases on a per paragraph basis. If I’m lucky, I’m left with something that is either a bit to short or a little to long for the space it needs to fill. This is usually corrected by increasing the spacing after each paragraph. I try not to alter the content, especially at this stage. I’ll also try to keep leading (space between lines of text) and font-sizes consistent above all, as everything is aligned to a baseline grid of 6 points. I think these are some of the most noticeable attributes of badly set copy. After about an hour of trimming, tucking, and caressing—I turn my attention back to the screen.

This is the part where I take some liberties with my position. Many times, the articles I receive are written originally in a language other than English, or by a non-native English speaker. They’re not poorly written, but the read could be a bit friendlier with some punctuation. While I stay away from changing the actual wording, I go to town with the dashes. I have a particular love of the em-dash, which comes in handy because everyone loves their run-on sentences.

Oh merciful, glorious, beautiful sun that is praise-worthy and worthy to be praised, every single day before my morning jog in the wooded trail behind the home where I dodge the heated licks of your hot hot rays!

A well placed em-dash can defuse the situation without altering the meaning or intention of the sentence.

Oh merciful, glorious, beautiful sun that is praise-worthy and worthy to be praised—every single day before my morning jog in the wooded trail behind the home where I dodge the heated licks of your hot hot rays!

It really tickles the nerd in me to see an en-dash—or even worse—a figure dash used in its place. I know nobody cares, but I actually enjoy reading about em-dash versus spaced en-dash arguments and style guides for publishing houses. Also, sites like Pain in the English.

My favorite punctuation mark of all time has to be the no-break space. It’s more of a rule than a punctuation mark really, but it exists in my glyphs palette, so it qualifies. This nifty device is used to tell the program to keep a certain set of characters together on the same line. Handy when dealing with something like bible verses (Jn 3:16-18) and French punctuation (more to come on this one.) I think I like punctuation marks because they’re so powerful, but not as overwhelming as words can be.

Though I could easily spend a whole day kerning, I do have other work to do. So, I leave it up to my typeface of choice for this particular project, which is National primarily throughout and FF Meta on occasion. The first thing I did when I came here was purchase National. The glyphset is one of the most comprehensive I’ve ever used, and I really enjoy using all of the characters, especially German.

Links to PDF files of the issues: 2008, I had no hand in, while 2009 was my first issue, and 2010 the most recent.
ICCRS Newsletter, Volume XXXIV - Number 2, March-April 2008
ICCRS Newsletter, Volume XXXV - Number 2, March-April 2009
ICCRS Newsletter, Volume XXXVI - Number 2, March-April 2010

It’s easy to redesign something for the sake of doing it, but that wouldn’t be very responsible of me. I made changes out of necessity—switching programs from Corel to Adobe, licensing typefaces, and moving production in-house. All of this ended up saving me a lot of time and effort, but most importantly money for the organization. This is just the first step in trying to produce more consistent design across print and web, especially after I’m no longer here. Among other things, I am looking forward to producing my first style-guide for an established entity. My idea of fun.

What I really want to talk about next though, is international punctuation rules, which is when things get really interesting. Seriously—that’s Part Two.