It seems increasingly common that newspapers, particularly free ones care little about form when it comes to laying out a page. I'm quite regularly baffled by an image which is sat next to a block of text which bears no resemblance to what's being reported only to find that the image relates to another, much smaller, piece and not the main text of the page. Although this fails as an anecdote, seeing it's mostly conjecture, but I'm pretty sure I saw a picture of a soldier recently, with some relatively morbid headline above it, I noticed the story didn't match the picture too well and then noticed that the picture was part of a completely different story, which had just a caption for the photo and that was it really. It strikes me that juxtaposing and image of a soldier, who is at risk of dying whilst on duty, with a headline relating to death (or something of that sort) is a pretty stupid idea as it could have caused some concern for the family of the soldier, who may have thought this was a report of their son/husband/fathers death, which it wasn't.
The above picture shows the common dropped capital at the start of the article which was easily mistaken for an indent line, or at least by me it was. The first words were "IT HAS", with the I as the block letter and T HAS sat so close together it reads as THAS. I'll admit that I tend to miss the dropped capital the majority of the time I read newspaper articles, as I'm just not used to it, but it shocks me that something as important as the first line of an article, something which is meant to draw you in, was so poorly formed, leading me to first ponder over the usage of the word 'thas' and then post a message about the poor use of typography on the Internet, good job of pulling me into the article there Evening Standard. Considering this was an article about iPhone app development, something that I am at leat vaguely, if not more so, interested in, it reflects even worse on them as I felt compelled to comment on it rather than read the article. Though I am strange like that. I feel that it is a particularly poor move by the editors to not have noticed that the use of a sans serif font resulting in a straight line for the dropped capital, was a silly idea and either used a serif font or changed the opening line, but then to further confound people having the character spacing so close that spaces become almost indistinguishable from gaps in letters, just seems crazy.
Quick breakdown of the free london papers etc.
The London Standard tries quite hard to look and feel like an upper class type paper, but generally fails by being a bit too amateur in some areas, such as knowing how to lay out information. The Metro is more bland and jumps about in it's layout style trying to cover all it's bases in one go. The London Lite is a piece of (London) shite and thus I shall speak of it no more. The Sport, I've never bothered read, it's about sport. The... forgotten what it's called... man focused (not in a booby way) magazine is a bit more trendy styled and generally does an all right job of laying stuff out, but it's still pretty pants.
Now obviously it's a bit mean to compare these free rags with anything you have to pay for, but I will. When you look at the guardian and the times you can see what good typography and layout is. The Guardian website in particular is lovely. It combines a clean layout with striking colours which relate to the different sections on the site giving you a easy way to know what you're looking at, thus, it make me happy.
My parents where down in London town recently to see me and hide from their church, a common thing to do if you go to an Anglican church, and we went to the V&A, where they had some slabs which where used to cast font styles back in the day when a font was a physical thing. It kinda struck me that there was a lot more to a font than just something that can be read and that before computers a font was something someone laboured over and thought about. Now, however, it seems fonts are generally used in a bit of an off way.
I'm not an expert in typography, nor do I know a great deal about it, but I'm also not completely inept at that kind stuff. My general philosophy with fonts in designs is that they shouldn't be overly complicated and they shouldn't really be the design, more a part of the design. It can be difficult to balance using a stylised font to aid the design whilst trying to keep it simplistic and not become too much of a distraction. It also seems a bit of a cheat if you use a font as the main part of your design, kinda feels like taking someone else's work and sticking it into your own work. My general fall back font is arial, partly because I'm a web developer and arial is about as standard as you can get with fonts, but also because it's a pretty nice, and versatile font. When used small it can add an element of class to a design as it's clear, but also subtle and when used large it stands out well, but doesn't over complicate things.
A good site for lovely typography is this one: I love Typography - I'll admit I haven't visited it that much, but when I do, I generally see something I like. So that's about as good an endorsement as I can muster.
Anyway I've said enough
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