COMPANY: The Worsley Press | URL: www.worsleypress.com | TYPE: How-to/Reference | LEVEL: Beginning/Advanced | PRICE: $36.95
				Type & Layout: Are you communicating or just making pretty shapes? by Colin Wheildon, with additional material by Geoffrey Heard. List price: US $36.95 | UK £17.95 | Aust. $39.95 March 2005, new and revised edition, 176 pages, soft cover, trim size: 7 x 9.5” ISBN 1-875750-22-3 “It is possible to blow away three-quarters of our readers simply by choosing the wrong type. If you rely on words to sell, that should concern you deeply.” -- Colin Wheildon, type and reading researcher and author of Type & Layout. A vital fact: what Colin Wheildon says about losing three-quarters of readers, just by switching fonts, is not his opinion, something he thinks. It is fact. He can say the wrong type can “blow away three-quarters of our readers” because, over a period of 10 years of painstaking research involving hundreds of subjects, he actually measured readers’ understanding of messages presented to them in a range of types and layouts. The late, great doyen of the New York advertising world, David Ogilvy, hailed Colin Wheildon’s research and asked him to investigate some specific questions on his behalf. Clearly focused on what his advertisements were supposed to do, sell to the max, Ogilvy made changes to his style in accordance with what the research told him. Until Wheildon did his research, ideas about what type and layout choices made for easy reading and what did not, were all opinion. Wheildon’s research showed that a lot of those opinions were good–but some, both positive and negative, were just not right. Yet they are still presented as though they are fact in many design schools. Graphic designer and advertising maverick, Ian McPherson, puts it succinctly: “Print...design suffers from techniques that can only be described as measurably wasteful. Type & Layout is a much-needed antidote for all this. It should be a prescribed text in every design school and a reference in every design studio.” And, we would suggest, a reference in the office of every account executive, advertising, sales or marketing manager, and CEO who uses print media to sell or persuade. Contents: What experts say Foreword Chapter 1: Introduction What This Book Can Do for You, A caveat Chapter 2: Why this study matters Chapter 3: Beautiful Square Wheels Chapter 4: Oops! Gravity works! The perils of ignoring gravity, Newspaper or formal layouts, Magazine or free layouts. Chapter 5: Body Type Serif or sans serif?, Bold & italics, Left, Right, Centered, Justified? Chapter 6: Headline type Headline types with greater legibility, Manipulated type, Conclusions on headlines. Chapter 7: Black versus color Black is beautiful, Spot color in print, Color in headline type, Colored body type, Color on color, Reversed body text, Conclusion overall. Chapter 8: Design bits Out, damned spot!, Widows, jumps and bastard measure, Design elements, Headlines, Body type. Chapter 9: Read this flyer! Why don’t they read your inserts?, What we learned, Readers’ preferred type sizes. Chapter 10: Conclusions Chapter 11: Applying the rules -- Fifteen cases Appendix 1: The Research The Research Program, About the participants, The methodology, What I told participants, My advisors, Comprehension or readability? Appendix 2: Color, reading, eyes On color, type, reading and the eyes. Appendix 3: Non-fluent readers Type and layout solutions. Appendix 4: Typographical terms Type, Measures, Spacing, PostScript. Glossary References Index Colin Wheildon notes with wry humour that his father was a master printer in Derby, UK, and thus to a degree, the natural enemy of what he himself became, a journalist and editor! Having been brought up with type, it was natural that Colin should take an interest in type and layout when he had the opportunity to influence those matters. The question he asked himself was simple: do my choices in type face and page design affect how much of my message readers comprehend? Searching for information, Colin found he was living in a world where whole forests were laid waste daily to provide paper for printed communications; but nobody had made a serious attempt to find out how effectively all that printed matter was, in fact, communicating. He consulted experts on research in a number of fields, recruited an initial 300 subjects–people of a range of ages from all walks of life–and began 10 years of painstaking work. This book is the result. Geoffrey Heard is a business writer, marketing consultant and publisher who was one of the pioneers of desktop publishing in Australia. He began with a Fat Mac and PageMaker v.1 and found vital help in developing his DTP skills in the publication of some of the early research described in this book. In addition to editing and laying out this book, Geoffrey, a graduate in psychology and business, provides some explanations of Colin Wheildon’s research results and contributes an invaluable examples and makeover section.