The Font Affront

“In a badly designed book, the letters mill and stand like starving horses in a field. In a book designed by rote, they sit like stale bread and mutton on the page. In a well-made book, where designer, compositor and printer have all done their jobs, no matter how many thousands of lines and pages, the letters are alive. They dance in their seats. Sometimes they rise and dance in the margins and aisles.”
Robert Bringhurst, The Elements of Typographic Style

It sometimes happens that we look like starving horses in a field. Our work and efforts, as stale bread. Our lives are dreadfully worded, poorly designed flyers in the post that gets eaten by slugs. Our pages are ruffled, the font is illegible, the stitching is coming loose and ideas are incoherent and incomplete.

We look at other people, dancing in their seats, margins and aisles. It looks as if they have it so together. Their designs are tight, their decisions are perfect, their outcomes gleam like freshly gold foiled Bodoni Oblique.

It rarely is as bad as we make it out to be.  Of course, there will be stale and mouldy things in our lives. And yes, many days start out with badly kerned sentences and by the end, we’ve definitely overused the flourishes. The dreaded third font tends to slip in on the same page and we cannot seem to get rid of the widows and orphans.

But here is the thing:

We simply do not need to print these pages. 

We own it, learn from them and move on. When we do get those brilliant breakthrough moments where it all falls into place, the words bloom into pieces of art, white space sings "We are the Champions" with big bold Futura and we get to dance in the gutters and aisles, make sure you print extra copies.