Typophile

Verdana in print

Stefan Leszczuk

Our company is being re-branded. We haven’t received a style guide yet but have been told in advance that all non-headline text - print as well as online - is to be in Verdana. The only example of long-form print copy being set in Verdana I can think of is from Ikea, where it looks brutal or anti-design - e.g. their Yearly Summary at http://www.ikea.com/ms/en_GB/about_ikea/facts_and_figures/yearly_summary... . Anyway, that PDF may be read online; we have to produce some print-only documents. I’ve shown the Ikea example to the designers and they say they would be happy with that sort of look on our print work.

Has anyone got any examples of Verdana working successfully as print body copy - or is it (as I suspect) a non-starter borne out of a ‘print is dead’ mindset?

Hrant H Papazian

Verdana is too large on the body to work well
for extended reading in print. In print it can
only work well for small sizes (I mean below
the reading comfort zone).

Good fonts are designed with a focus on a narrow
range of tasks. Verdana is a good font. But long
printed text is not at all its focus.

Hopefully enough of us will chime in with similar
opinions and your superiors will read this thread
and decide to find a better typeface for the task.

hhp

Si_Daniels

Don't overlook the new Verdana's made by Matthew Carter, Font Bureau and Ascender...

http://georgiaverdana.com/

Cheers, Si

Craig Eliason

In scalable font formats, what does "too large on the body to work well" mean? (I.e., what remains of the "too large" problem if you just lower the point size?)

Hrant H Papazian

> what remains of the "too large" problem if you just lower the point size?

Nice way to put the question. "Too large on the body"
effectively means the x-height and/or the width (usually
more the former) are too great. What "remains" when you
lower the point size is too great a reliance on letterform
bodies (x-height region) which are only good at making
individual letters easier to see, hence decipher; in contrast
the extenders (which lose out when the x-height is too great)
help extended reading. Here's a -simplified- explanation:
http://themicrofoundry.com/ss_read1.html
See the rightmost image if you'd like to cut to the chase.

This is a classic issue, and the reason that newspaper
fonts are large on the body while book fonts are small.
Nevermind that no ideal text fonts are sans...

BTW, Verdana is also too loose to promote comfortable
extended reading in print. Onscreen is a different story,
in fact there Verdana is basically a one-pixel-looser
version of Tahoma because the latter -which is nothing
more than a [good] UI font- is way too tight for extended
reading.

hhp

Captured from web.archive.org on 12 Mar 2014. view this capture