ospalh reviewed Typographic design by Philip B. Meggs
Bad typography for a book about typography
3 stars
One of the things that really annoyed me was the text samples for the different typefaces near the end. They are their own blind text, set fully justified, and set without hyphenation. That does not work. Like that you get giant spaces, wider than the word »to« on either side of the word »to«. Oh, and the blind text: it talks about beautiful typography.
When the book talks about fully justified text it warns against overusing hyphenation. I guess English is different then German in this respect, because of the German way of compounding words, but in German the general rule that it is better to hyphenate more than to have gaps in the text. If necessary, you have to accept strings of hyphens on the right edge.
The diagram of the typographic design process at the start of chapter 10 is hilarious in how bad it is with five …
One of the things that really annoyed me was the text samples for the different typefaces near the end. They are their own blind text, set fully justified, and set without hyphenation. That does not work. Like that you get giant spaces, wider than the word »to« on either side of the word »to«. Oh, and the blind text: it talks about beautiful typography.
When the book talks about fully justified text it warns against overusing hyphenation. I guess English is different then German in this respect, because of the German way of compounding words, but in German the general rule that it is better to hyphenate more than to have gaps in the text. If necessary, you have to accept strings of hyphens on the right edge.
The diagram of the typographic design process at the start of chapter 10 is hilarious in how bad it is with five circles with four words in them and arrows going hither and yon and it doesn’t make any sense at all.
Sometimes the text uses »italics« when it clearly means just slanted versions of the basic typeface.