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Fellow typophiles, As a book designer, I am creating this topic in order to get help and learn from members who are certainly more knowledgeable and have more experience than me in setting typography. I love humanist typefaces and want to use Robert Slimbach's revival distributed as Adobe Jenson. As you all know, it provides optical sizes ranging from caption do display as well as different weights from light to bold. What I am trying to achieve is a correct type color on the page. Jenson regular is too aggressive and lack elegance while Jenson light is too anemic (but has elegance). I want to know how to strike a balance between these two extremes and get a weight that is between the light and regular. I know editing software such as fontographer provide such tools but don't know how to proceed artfully (which I know takes a lifetime). It seems to me that choosing an em size in fontographer by simply clicking on "change weight" is not all there is to it. So could a generous soul guide me on this path to achieving music for the eyes. (This could be references to books, websites, tutorials, suggestions, advice, etc.) I recently discovered the I Tatti Renaissance Library series published by Harvard. I thinks that its design, beautifully orchestred by Dean Bornstein of Perpetua Press, interprets quiet elegantly the Renaissance period. He used Adobe Jenson and definitely changed the weight of the typeface but I think it still remains too thin, especially the italics. Do you think he made Adobe Jenson light weightier or Adobe Jenson Regular thinner ? How do you proceed in doing this? Here's a sample page from the series: And here are two links for more information on the design: http://www.theperpetuapress.com/?p=223 http://www.hup.harvard.edu/features/itatti/about-book-design.html

Hello everyone, in my current book design contract, I've come across an issue and I'm curious if any designers out there have any suggestions: I have come across the term "AL East" (as in the American League East, one of the divisions in Major League Baseball) within normal text. Throughout this book (and generally throughout my work) I follow Robert Bringhurst's guidelines of using small caps for acronyms/abbreviations, except for two-letter geographic acronyms (such as DC in Washingon DC) and acronyms that refer to someone's name (such as E.B. White). I admit it looks odd to set "AL" in small caps, followed by the word "East" set in regular upper/lowercase. But it also seems a bit odd to have small caps during pretty much all other instances of abbreviations/acronyms (ex. "WWI aviation", "5:00 AM") except this one. I'm leaning towards making MLB divisions (AL East, NL Central, etc.) an exception to the abbreviation/acronym rule, but I'm also curious to know if anyone else has come across this issue before, and what solutions other people would suggest. Thanks!

Hi everybody! I have recently started helping a professor at my uni with the design of his book, which is a 500+ pages study on the architecture of high-rise buildings. I really want to make things look very neat, and here's a list of typefaces I might or might not use for the body text: Minion Pro Garamond Premier Pro Warnock Pro ITC New Veljovic Pro Times Ten LT Std FF Meta Serif Pro FF Meta Pro Whitney Probably some of them are a big no-no when it comes to body text, but I'm not very sure. My options are limited to fonts that have cyrillic characters. I have attached a PDF file (and here's a jpg also) with a sample paragraph (the language is Bulgarian), set with each typeface, and I need your advice on what will work best. Any help will be greatly appreciated! Thank you.