5 Trick Pony Brand Guidelines v3

Don’t use a font you don’t need.
3.7
Ordering
Information
The marriage of type and text requires courtesy to the in-laws, but it does not mean that
all of them ought to move in, nor even that all must come to visit.
Boldface roman type did not exist until the nineteenth cen- tury. Bold italic is even more recent. Generations
of good typog- raphers were quite content ‘without such variations. Font manu- facturers nevertheless now
often sell these extra weights as part of a basic package, thereby encouraging typographers - beginners
especially - to use bold roman and italic whether they need them or not.
Bold and semibold faces do have their value. They can be used, for instance, to flag items in a list, to set
titles and subheads u&lc in small sizes, to mark the opening of the text on a complex page, or to thicken the
texture of lines that will be printed in pale ink or as dropouts (negative images) in a colored field. Sparingly
used, they can effectively emphasize numbers or words, such as the headwords, keywords and definition
numbers in a dictionary. They can also be used (as they often are) to shout at readers, putting them on
edge and driving them away; or to destroy the historical integrity of a typeface designed before boldface
roman was born; or to create unintentional anachronisms, something like adding a steam engine or a fax
machine to the stage set for King Lear.
Don’t clutter the foreground.
3.8
Ordering
Information
When boldface is used to emphasize words, it is usually best to leave the punctuation in
the background, which is to say, in the basic text font. It is the words, not the punctuation,
that merit emphasis in a sequence such as the following:
But if the same names are emphasized by setting them in italic rather than bold, there is no advantage in
leaving the punctuation in roman. With italic text, italic punctuation normally gives better letterfit and thus
looks less obtrusive:
“Typography, we’ve fostered the modern
idea of individuality, but it destroyed the
medieval sense of community
and integration”
- NEIL POSTMAN