Typophile

Magazine Type Choices

Will Miller

so i work for magazine doing design and layout. sometimes it's creative, most times it's not. it's a fashiony/modern living type magazine. when i signed on there were things i just cringed at dealing with their use of type...my question is this, when dealing with headlines (that would be larger text used for display headlines on a page in a magazine) what would you recommend fitting the modern living fashion criteria? currently they are using something like Folio Bold Condensed at like 48 to 72 point depending on the situation. personally, i can stand it. don't mind it small for caption stuff but for my eyes it seems to just fall apart at larger scales. some other faces they use are akzidenz and weiss.

if you have any example pics, stories or whatever i;d love to see and hear. thanks!

will

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Hrant H Papazian

Could you give us more info on the readership, like average age, etc.?

Also: The point-size & word-count you typically use in the headlines - does it benefit from a condensed design?

hhp

Will Miller

hrant,

readership age is fairly mixed but the most prominent age group would be early 30's to early 40's...i would guess target age is about 33/34....definitely geared toward people with money (my sentiments are the readers are just out of touch with what's hip and want to feel hip by reading articles about hip things...supposedly hip. whatever that means)

as for the treatment of the text benefiting from a condensed standpoint; no, not really. although they usually use it for single words and 3 lines...sort of develops a squareish composition of 3 words....although when one word is significantly shorter than the others it gets tracked all to hell to fit. argh. it makes my skin crawl just thinking about it.

i guess my feeling is there are better faces to use besides supersizing folio and tracking it out to fit in a space. i just dont think slamming type into a system like that is good for anyone but it's their consistent look and the funny thing is it looks awful and seems to not fit with the rest of the mag. it would be like taking the cover page of a bad tabloid and using at the cover for the wall street journal. neither of the two support the other so there is just a lack in flow. so i'd really like to propose a differnet face to use for these headlines...or better yet develop something. i just started this job about 2 1/2 months ago so my outgoing attitude is still at

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