Worst typography EVER!

[simont]

Imagine, if you will, a paperback novel typeset as follows:

• The entire cover of the book (title, spine and blurb), the chapter headings, and the book title at the top of each page are all in Dom Casual.
• The occasional lengthy footnotes, as well as the page numbers at the bottom, are in ITC Galliard Italic, with too little leading.
• The main body text is in the supremely ugly LTC Twentieth Century.
• There is no hyphenation at all, so that it's fairly common to find a line with so little text on it that the spaces are half an inch wide, and extremely common to find a line in which noticeable space has had to be inserted between letters to make the text justify even remotely sensibly.

I'm really having a hard time imagining how it might be possible to make a book uglier than this. I'm not even convinced the use of Comic Sans would make it much worse. I'm also having a hard time believing that whoever typeset it managed to make it this disgusting by accident; I don't think you can do this bad a job out of simple ignorance. You would surely have had to have read a book on typography and deliberately disobeyed most of it.

(On the plus side, in the course of writing this post I discovered www.identifont.com, which is very cool and without which I would certainly not have been able to provide the exact font names given above.)

Comments

[fluffymormegil.livejournal.com]

You find the typesetters, I'll fetch some burly mechanics to assist, we'll grab a copy of the book, and then we'll Advance Science!

[taimatsu]

Ewwww :(

Yer LTC Twentieth Century is interestingly similar to the much-beloved Gill Sans - but the differences are enough to make it nastier. The latter has a thicker line which makes it better proportioned overall, I think. I'm not sure I'd use Gill Sans for book text anyway. Seriffed typefaces are supposed to be easier on the eye for extended reading if you're used to them, IIRC.

[fluffymormegil.livejournal.com]

I certainly wouldn't use that kind of sans-serif for bulk text; it's too... fancy. Something in the vein of Helvetica or Arial (yes, Arial; I have never understood what's supposed to be disagreeable about it!) is much more appropriate.

[ceb.livejournal.com]

identifont> this could be the beginning of a beautiful addiction.

[xach.livejournal.com]

I'm obliged to mention that identifont is powered by Common Lisp.

LTC Twentieth Century looks a lot like Futura.

[gareth-rees.livejournal.com]

Yes, compare the two and it's clear that LTC Twentieth Century (http://www.identifont.com/show?HVQ) is a rip off of Futura (http://www.identifont.com/find?font=futura&q=Go) (pointy angles on AMVW, no tail on the j, tall ascenders, backwards-S shaped ?, etc etc). The only significant differences I can see are in the less-used characters: LTC has a flat base on the ₤ and Futura a curly base; LTC has a supremely hideous Ø.

So Simon, are you sure it's not Futura? Futura is much better known and comes as standard with Mac OS X, so it's much more likely to be that.

[simont]

You're right; it could quite easily have been Futura. I think I jumped to the conclusion that it wasn't because the first Futura-alike I looked at on that site was PL Futura Maxi, which lacks the backwards-S question mark, so I assumed that was a point of distinction between Twentieth Century and Futura. But all the other Futuras on there do have that question mark, so yes, it could perfectly well have been one of those instead.

[simont]

In fact, yes, it's definitely a Futura rather than a Twentieth Century: the TCs both have a Q whose tail doesn't go below the baseline, whereas this font's does. On the other hand, it's not the Futura you link to there either, because that one has a J which goes below the baseline, and this font doesn't. So it looks to be either Futura (BT) or Futura Serie BQ. I can't see any clear points of distinction between those two, but on the basis of general weight I'd guess it's the former.

[bjh21.livejournal.com]

I can see some differences in those examples: the acute, grave, and circumflex accents have horizontal ends in the Bitstream version, but perpendicular ones in the Berthold version. This may not be of much help.

[simont]

I'll keep an eye out for any accents that might crop up in the text, but I don't remember having seen any so far, so it may not help. Still, it's not terribly important.

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

Is it also crap?

I remember reading a guide to writing books using LaTeX that said: it is very hard to spot good typesetting, because the point of it is to not get in the way, but bad typesetting makes itself obvious.

[deliberateblank.livejournal.com]

Hmph. It fails to identify Palatino.

[meirion.livejournal.com]

Enquiring minds want to know: what's the book?

-m-

[simont]

A 1990s reprint of Galactic Patrol, from the Lensman series.