Typophile

Suggestions / Literary Magazine Project

Sebastian Villalonga

Hi guys,

I am doing a Sketch Layout for a A5 size Literary Magazine. It supposed to be a lot of text with very little or none photography at all. The cover will be in colour but inside text and photographs will be black and white. I can only use an extra ink which i think it will be red but i not sure yet. The printing cost is quite a factor here since is a small writers club but with good focus on design. I would like to ask you if

1 - Do you know of good samples in Literary Magazine to learn or get ideas from? the style will be mostly text and black and white with one extra ink in colour. I am studying grids and columns combinations as crazy. A5 is an interesting challenge for the size!

2 - Just for the start I am using Minion Pro/ Gill Sans Light [8,5pt/11 pt leading] or Plantin/Helvetica [8pt/10,5 pt leading] as my started font set combination. It is a very classic magazine style approach, but do you know of other typographic combinations that you might like? There is a tight balance of good legibility in A5 size considering doing two columns with nice white areas and well proportioned margins. Sorry, a bit of Swiss Design School here.

3 - Do you know of any good text generator which can do foreign languages? I became a bit bored of the regular Lorem Ipsum Text Generator. I discovered

http://loremipscream.com/

which generate dummy text in other languages. Unfortunately it just gives you a simple paragraph. I found German suits well this literary style project. I don't know maybe because the long and mysterious words (not for a german speaker of course, he).

Sorry for so many questions and thanks for any help or ideas.

Cheers,
S

Andreas Stötzner

… Sorry, a bit of Swiss Design School here

– it’s no shame to be Swiss! ;-)

As for the typeface, this one may be an alternative to Minion, it’s a bit more crisp.

For dummy text: I found it very handy to go to a respective Wikipedia site and pinch a bit of text in one of the articles. So you can be sure that this is *real* text in that language.

Good luck for your project! Hope to see some pages here … some day.

Igor Freiberger

I second Andreas suggestion. Andron is a very interesting typeface (you can test the regular weight for free).

But I don't like the Minion/Gill Sans combo (or Andron/Gill Sans). You can consider to use just one font and work with its variations (small caps, italics, swashes, etc.) which usually goes very well for this kind of publication. Or adopt a more even sans, like Info Text, Officina, Tabula or Eva. Myriad/Frutiger also work well, but you may want to escape from the 'Adobian' combo Minion/Myriad.

And to use real texts is always better than these 'lorem' demos.

Sebastian Villalonga

Hi Andreas, thanks for the link to your font. It is ver interesting indeed. I will try it now. I also followed your advice of copy/paste text from Wikipedia. It is the *real* text, no doubt.

Hi Freiberger, thanks for good advice. I will experiment with one family font and its variant too. By the way, which is the difference between a Minion Display and just Minion?. I will also try you suggestion of looking for a stronger Sans as well.

By the way, if any of you recall of any good literary Magazine, just let me know. By the way, a friend of mine has the Playboy (French Version) Magazine and i must say (jokes apart...hehe) that has a quite interesting text design. Some articles, are very much for the reading point of view, nice and classic design and not like Esquire Mag that has to show its hip and goes more on the Men/Gadget style of magazine.

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