Fonts

Affair of the Century Font Family.

In selecting typefaces, if you're not a professional typographer, a good practice is to stick with one font family (e.g., Univers, Helvetica) throughout a document.

Our company has often used the combination of New Century for body text and Franklin Gothic for headlines. It turns out that, in a way, these fonts also come from the same family. The original Century was designed by Linn Boyd Benton for The Century Magazine in 1894. His son, Morris Fuller Benton, designed Franklin Gothic. The prolific Morris also made the Century family fuller with Century Schoolbook, New Century, and other variations that remain popular.

Attractive font couples

Not being any sort of typographer myself, I couldn't name another pair of fonts from different font families that complement each other notably well. But the designer Daniel Will-Harris has developed a list of fonts he likes to pair up. This list is oriented to fonts for printing.

Fonts for computer displays

Computer displays require fonts that look clear at low resolution. Will-Harris also recounts an interesting conversation about screen fonts with typographic luminary Charles Bigelow, co-designer (with Kris Holmes), of the Lucida family. Here are some of his recommendations:

  • Verdana is a font designed for Microsoft by Matthew Carter. It is among the best choices for text type on screen. It's kinda outsize, though.
  • Georgia is a serif font designed for Microsoft by Matthew Carter. Notice the numerals -- 1234567890. When numerals don't all line up on the baseline, they're called oldstyle.
  • Rockwell is a slab serif or "Egyptian" font, so-called, because it was used to signal troop movements in Napoleon's Egyptian campaign.
  • Arial is a remarkably clean and legible font, which some disdain for its lack of stylishness. We like it for text, but not headlines.
  • Lucida Sans boasts true Italics, meaning that the Italic characters are individually designed. In many other fonts, the italics are nothing but roman characters slanted to the right.

No serif font looks really good in body copy on the screen, says Bigelow, because, at low resolution in small sizes, the number of pixels it takes to form a serif makes up too great a proportion of the whole. In other words, they don't look the way they're supposed to, no matter what.

I had assumed all the Lucida fonts supplied with PCs were suitable for screen use. Not so, says Bigelow, who singles out his own Lucida Bright as a particularly dim choice for on-screen display.

A good choice for text editors

Speaking of Lucida, if you use a text editor for scripting, you might want to try changing from the default screen font to Lucida Console.

Here is Courier New, the default for some text editors I've used, at 11pt.

Here is 11pt Lucida Console.

— BGM

About Us and 2-Minute Explainers

Business Information Graphics is a company run by MBAs and writers. We started the business because we saw a niche for a boutique firm providing a combination of strong B2B editorial services and multimedia. We like what we do: it's one interesting story after another. We like talking with people in sales and marketing, and we like the challenge of distilling what they tell us into a two minute message.

Efficient and effective B2B communications since 1986

Business Information Graphics was founded in 1986 to provide editorial and graphic services for business-to-business communications. The founders, Bruce McKenzie and Lorna Pautzke, had both held a variety of marketing and communications positions at the world's largest paper company, International Paper. Persuaded that nearly all the marketing communication firms calling on them were more interested in creating award-winning graphic design than they were in producing effective day-to-day marketing communication, they formed Business Information Graphics to focus on producing marketing materials that would win customers for clients.

Marketing Communication for IT

Most of our clients are in Information Technology, so there's always something new to write about. But (it seems to us, anyway) when IT companies write about themselves, it comes out sounding pretty bland. We came up with the idea of 2-Minute Explainers[link to 2me] in the course of researching prospects for our business - we often found that, after spending ten or fifteen minutes poring over company's website, we still had only a vague idea what was being sold and why a person would buy it. 2-Minute Explainers solve that problem nicely

Desktop publishing for B2B

Another interest was desktop publishing, which was just getting started with the introduction of the PostScript-powered Apple LaserWriter. The company bought its first copy of PowerPoint (at a New York Macintosh Users Group fair) before Microsoft bought PowerPoint (it was published by ForeThought of Sunnyvale, CA). We took on just about any project that required editorial, design and desktop publishing skills-from rewriting and formatting the strategic plan of a telecom logistics company to writing a book on desktop publishing for Hammermill Paper Company. We also created brochures, newsletters, executive presentations, packaging, videos-all the normal corporate and marketing communication items. When computer-based multimedia started becoming feasible for B2B communication (we were among the first authorized Macromedia developers, having started out with MacroMind VideoWorks), we began to focus more on multimedia, which takes advantage of Bruce McKenzie's radio-TV background and knack for writing things that sound good when spoken out loud. We created a number of interactive presentations for trade shows and new product introductions-kiosks and stand-up presentations, as well as the accompanying literature.

Flash animations that make sense

As broadband Internet connections became the norm, we naturally gravitated to Flash, though we never liked those "Skip Intro" productions that so many businesses seemed to think were the ne plus ultra of a high-tech home page. We began packaging B2B value propositions as 2-Minute Explainers® in 2003. Originally just a shorthand way of describing our general approach to multimedia, the idea has become both a business process and an actual "product." The process (which requires that we get a thorough understanding of a company and product) often leads to other engagements. After all, once you've distilled something into two minutes of lucid prose and snappy graphics, it's not difficult to repurpose what you've done as a brochure, sellsheet or a set of web pages.

Team

Bruce McKenzie writes and produces multimedia productions, brochures, books, articles, and videos. He is the author of The Hammermill Guide to Desktop Publishing in Business, as well as articles in various new media publications. He was a market development manager and creative services director at International Paper where he managed product development and advertising for the 2-billion fine papers business. He produced the first coast-to-coast cable broadcast of a video corporate annual report. He produced a number of award-winning corporate videos, including "The Price," an antitrust docudrama which was named best industrial video of the year at the Chicago Film Festival, and has been used in the antitrust education programs of many Fortune 500 companies. He holds master's degrees in broadcast journalism and business administration.

Lorna Pautzke looks at B-2-B business presentations with the discerning and skeptical eye of an industrial marketer and product manager, which she was, at International Paper, before helping to start up Business Information Graphics. Lorna developed pricing and service policies in a multimillion-dollar segment of IP's fine papers business. An MBA, with a concentration in marketing and market research, she sets and enforces high standards for research, editorial, and creative quality. She directs all aspects of production, from the definition of expectations and expected costs to on-time and on-budget delivery of the end product. She directs the activities of subcontractors and manages the costs to be sure that projects meet expectations and come in on time and on budget.

Anthony Coccia Director of Art & Animation, creates the original art and animation at Business Information Graphics. A graduate of the University of the Arts, in graphic design, he also attended the prestigious Yale Summer Program in Graphic Design in Brissago, Switzerland. There, he received instruction from such design leaders as Paul Rand and Armin Hofmann. Before joining the company, he worked in the creative department of Novartis Pharmaceuticals. At Business Information Graphics, Anthony's knack for animation was ideal for the emerging multimedia revolution. His motion graphics have captivated thousands in such venues as trade shows, online, and corporate films.