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Pikathulu Blade asks:

"Do you know a good font that can be easily read at small point sizes? [The project is] a two-color pocket-sized booklet of about 50 pages. I have to pack in as much info as I can while making it readable for older people with bad eyesight."

Thanks for the great question!

Not only can I recommend some typefaces, but I have some secret copyfitting tricks that can help you "pack in" more copy—on this project or any other—without reducing overall point size.

Since I don’t know the intended purpose or audience of your booklet nor have I seen the layout’s theme, I can only make general recommendations in terms of typeface.

From your description you have two goals in mind:

• Keep production costs low by limiting pages, and;

• Maintain a high readability.

Generally, for long passages of text in print you want a serif typeface (the kind with feet). In print, the serifs (usually) aid the reader’s eye in moving between characters in a word. In other words, serifs aid readability. Incidentally, legibility is recognizing individual characters (”glyphs”) while readability is the ease of reading; they are not always synonymous.

For your booklet you probably want a serif typeface. The next consideration is x-height, the vertical height of the lowercase x in relation to the cap-height, which you may surmise is the height of the capital letter X. As a rule of thumb (with obligatory exceptions, of course) the higher the x-height, the more open and legible the glyphs are at smaller sizes. If your booklet needs to have small type—under 11 pts—then you want a typeface with a reasable x-height so the lowercase letters will be easily recognized and enhance readability.

Adobe Caslon, Microsoft’s Georgia, and Adobe’s Minion Pro are all pretty good at small sizes. If you want maximum typographical control, use the OpenType versions of the typefaces in an OpenType-aware layout application like InDesign. Adobe Caslon Pro and Adobe Minion Pro are included with Adobe Creative Suite and its standalone constituent products. Georgia is free. If you have Windows 2000 or XP, you already have the OpenType Georgia installed on your system. If not, then you can download it free from the link in the Resources section at the end of this article.

If you’re thinking a nice san-serif typeface would better fit your design, try Futura, Gill Sans, or Myriad. All of these are available from Adobe in OpenType format, or in varying formats from other type foundries. Again, check out the Resources section below.

Warning! Never tell an editor or non-creative supervisor about the following tips! If you do, you’ll be expected to employ them on every project, thus eliminating their utility to help you out of long-copy/short-space jams.

Fitting copy into tight spaces is one of the terrible burdens born by layout artists. Here are some time-honored, Top Secret tips to help you make the most of the space you have. As alluded to above, you don’t want to let your editors or supervisors see these tips. If they come from the creative side of the business, they already know these tricks—and the trade-offs involved in making use of them. If, however, your editors or supervisors are not from a layout design background, you don’t want them to know about these techniques—or worse, find out you know about them. Fitting an extra fifty words into a page is every editor’s dream, one they often pursue without regard for the poor layout slave who has to do the copy fitting. If they learn you know exactly how to give them fifty more words, they’ll push for one hundred more.

So, before continuing, it is imperative you take the solumn oath of Copyfitting Silence. Repeat after me: I, (state your name), (now that you’ve said “state your name,” actually say your name), do hereby swear to uphold the silence of the ancient copyfitting secrets about to be bestowed upon me. I affirm that, should I ever divulge any of these secrets to an editor or non-creative supervisor, my right to use any typeface but Helvetica and Comic Sans shall forever be revoked.”

Now that you’re sworn in, let’s go.

When laying out a non-repeating piece like a brochure, poster, or annual report, adhering to a standard is often less important than when working on a design that re-issues, a magazine, newspaper, or corporate identity piece, for instance. With non-repeating pieces, if copy doesn’t fit, the grid or the size of the container or of the type can often be adjusted to accomodate without a second thought. In cases where the grid, container, or point size of the type is unmutable, however, there are ways to squeeze a little more in without any noticable loss of reability or legibility.

Most designers faced with more copy than will fit immediately reach for the leading box. They should have their knuckles wrapped with a pica ruler.

Open leading is critical for overall legibility and document color. Never, never reduce leading to fit more copy. Only those who know and have completely exhausted all other options should reduce their leading. There are other, more powerful, less destructive and disruptive tricks to employ long before touching leading.

Working with the example of a multiple-column layout typical of any magazine, newspaper, newsletter, and of many booklets, I’ve created a layout in InDesign. The same techniques work in any layout/design application with good typographic controls—InDesign, QuarkXPress, PageMaker, Corel Ventura, Illustrator, even Photoshop.

At left is what 925 words per page looks like set in Adobe’s Warnock Pro at 10pt/14pt in three columns. Other than turning on Optical kerning and opening the leading a bit, everything else is default. In both examples I turned off InDesign’s multi-line composer to make the two sets of columns as uniform as possible.

 

On the right is the exact same copy, though the page holds 1,000 words—room for another three lines! The copy is set identical to the first in the basic options—Adobe Warnock Pro at 10pt on 14pt leading and Optical kerning. The differences are that I’ve manually tweaked the tracking to -4 and scaled the width of the characters down by 4%.

Adjusting the character width and tracking just a little fit just under and an additional 100 words into the same space without even touching leading, and, more importantly, without sacrificing legibility and readability.

Look at the zoom view on the right by itself for a moment&