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.
A magazine like the New York Review of Books communicates through columns of type; they’re plain, straightforward, and readable. The heart of the magazine is its ideas, and those ideas are articulated in the words. The New York Review is meant to be read.
A magazine like *surface, on the other hand, is clearly meant to be browsed. It’s filled with colorful fashion shots, and what text there is (there’s actually a fair bit) tends to get shunted aside as colorless slabs of small, industrial-looking sans serif type, which get shaped and poked into by graphic elements to suit the look of the page rather than the needs of the reader. It’s often hard to distinguish the editorial pages from the ads; one typographic aid to doing this is the use of a consistent and distinctive display face in much of the magazine.
A subversive hybrid is nest: a quarterly of interiors,which is wildly visual – a browser’s paradise – but features real articles in diverse styles. Each piece of text is treated differently, but within the traditions of book typography: the text blocks, the spacing, the choice of typeface actually invite you to read each article, rather than bounce off it. The juxtaposition of in-your-face visual presentation and readable text type is one of nest’s charms. (But then, what would you expect from a magazine where the art director is also the editor in chief?)
The Uses of Type
Type in magazines is basically used on one of three levels: as straight text, whether in small bits nestled among the pictures or in whole pages of prose; as headlines and other big display words or phrases; and as what I call “small display,” which includes subheads, subtitles, and pull quotes. There’s sometimes a fourth kind of type, which doesn’t fit into this neat hierarchy and is usually found in separate, discrete elements on the page: “infotext,” like the callouts and labels in infographics, or the text in tables or broken-out lists.
What’s hard to find in contemporary magazines, at least in the United States, is clarity and simplicity. Instead, the trend for many years has been toward clutter. But, through juxtaposition and contrast, some publication designers can impose a visual order on the clutter that draws our attention instead of repelling it.
Contrast and Consistency
The dramatic use of a typeface that has a distinctive character can pull a reader into a story. Strong contrast, sweeping curves, and lively details in the type itself are really brought out when the type is used with confidence. The display type in Rolling Stone is renowned for achieving this over and over again, which is one reason why it keeps ending up in awards shows for design and typography. The same can be said of Esquire. Using type dramatically and readably at the same time is the secret; a clear contrast between hot display type and cool text is important.
It’s also important that the text be comfortably readable. Esquire does better than Rolling Stone at that; both use narrow justified columns of text, but Rolling Stone tends to let the typesetting software squeeze and stretch the space between letters to fit the line, which Esquire does less often. It’s distracting when the texture of the type varies from line to line, and this makes the text less readable. If you care about people reading your text, it’s a mistake to let graphic elements butt into the text columns, making them temporarily narrow.
The Everyday Challenge
Striking typography isn’t found only in national or international magazines. The New York Times Magazine is routinely given awards for its design these days, and deservedly so. On a more local level, the San Francisco Chronicle’s slim weekly magazine shows how inviting text type and skillful juxtaposition of photography and display type can make even a fluffy gardening piece worth browsing.
Using type in magazines is one of the most challenging forms of typography, because you have to master every kind of typographic design: from the high-impact commotion of ad design to the smooth flow of running text. But the touchstone is near at hand. Before we are designers, we are all browsers and readers.