5 Trick Pony Brand Guidelines v3

Edit tables with the same attention given
to text, and set them as text to be read.
4.1
Types
& Faces
Tables are notoriously time-consuming to typeset, but the problems posed are often
editorial as much as typographic.
I f the table is not planned in a readable form to begin with, the typographer can render it readable
only by rewriting or redesigning it from scratch.
Tables, like text, go awry when approached on a purely tech- nical basis. Good typographic answers
are not elicited by asking questions such as “How can I cram this number of characters into that
amount of space?”
If the table is approached as merely one more form of text, which must be made both good to read
and good to look at, several principles will be clear:
• All text should be horizontal, or in rare cases oblique. Setting column heads
vertically as a space-saving measure is quite fea- sible if the text is in
Japanese or Chinese, but not if it is written in the Latin alphabet.
• Letterforms too small or too condensed for comfortable reading are not part
of the solution.
• There should be a minimum amount of furniture (rules, boxes, dots and other
guiderails for traveling through typographic space) and a maximum amount
of information.
• Rules, tint blocks or other guides and dividers, where they are necessary at
all, should run in the predominant reading direction: vertically in the case of
lists, indices and some numerical tables, and horizontally otherwise.
• A rule located at the edge of a table, separating the first or final column from
the adjacent empty space, ordinarily serves no function.
• A table, like any other text in multiple columns, must contain within itself an
adequate amount of white space.
“Una y otra vez, los lectores se han
condicionado mutuamente.”
- GERARD UNGER