I've been infatuated with this newspaper logo for a long time, it's so good to see a brand that not trying to 'tidy up' a typeface with character, but instead fully embraces it. From this article: "The logo dates back to 1904, when the paper began publishing daily again after a period of unrest. The designer is unknown, but it’s very much a product of its time, reflecting the Jugendstil (or Finnish Art Nouveau) architecture that Helsinki is also known for. The logo was originally digitized back in 1989. When we started scaling up the letterforms for the new campaign, we realized how sloppy the original work actually was. So last spring, type designer Eino Korkala redrew the logo from scratch – now we can use it even at building-size scale. (He also created a version that works perfectly on mobile screens.) So yeah, this is only the third time the logo has been updated in 130 years!"

You read better with some air. If your text is set very tight, it’s much harder to discern sentences, words and letters from one another. They need to be given some space. Between paragraphs, between lines, between letterforms. The reading experience gets much worse if your eyes have to traverse dense blocks of information. Don’t cram the page with information. Favour clear line spacing and paragraph breaks. Take a breath of air.

You’re writing a report to be designed and published, and your blocks of text need some separation from each other. You write about different things, and headings will introduce the reader to the paragraphs under them. For someone just leafing through your report, they’ll easily spot points of interest and draw them into the text. In a larger text, you might need several levels of headings. The first one is for the general theme, like a chapter title. The next one is for subheadings, for themes within the chapter. The third, and perhaps even the fourth and fifth, for examples or even deeper sectioning. STRUCTURALLY, you should look over your heading hierarchy and make sure it makes sense. Are you using the same level of heading for the same type of content beneath it? TECHNICALLY, you should define the heading with a style in your document, not just mark it and make it bigger. Using heading styles will make it clear to a designer and typesetter what level of heading you’re intending to use. Even though your Word, Pages or Google document’s headings look a certain way, it doesn’t mean it’s the way they will be formatted in the final published document. That depends on brand guidelines, design choices, opinions and technology. There are many ways to make sure headings are clearly differentiated from the normal paragraph style: They can be bigger. Obviously. THEY CAN BE IN ALL CAPS, or small caps (preferably with some good tracking between the letters). They can be bold, italic, underlined (please don’t) – or even combinations of these (oh, please don’t). They can be set in another typeface. They can be centred above the paragraphs, or indented, or outdented, or placed in the margin, or somehow moved out from the expected reading rhythm. They can be coloured, decorated or otherwise made to look different from the main typeface. Or various combinations of the above conventions can make the headings stand out. Just be consistent, so it’s easy for the reader to get that we’re moving on to another topic, or diving further down into the current one.

I spend hours every week looking at text on a page. My aim is to make sure the text reads well and doesn’t bother the reader in unforeseen ways. I’m paid to design a publication, make it look professional, making sure the files are ready for print or for digital distribution. But in that process, I read a lot of it. And when I read, I notice things. And when I notice things, the text becomes better. Because I see inconsistencies. The writer has written ‘organisation’ here, but ‘organization’ there. They’ve used those long em-dashes a lot of times, but shorter en-dashes with some spacing sometimes. The footnote reference number is often placed after the period, but sometimes right before it. I clean up all this. Not because I’ve been asked to, but because when someone hires me, I’m making sure that the final deliverable is as consistent and precise as a seasoned reader would expect and appreciate. Often, it’s apparent what is right and what is wrong, so I just take care of it. Other times it’s a stylistic choice that we’ll discuss. Either way, this is part of the invisible work which is raising the standards in the designs that come out the other end. Are your standards set?

A mistake I often see in the layout of academic publications: The line length is too wide. The text is stretched wide upon the page, and the margins are too narrow. This forces the reader to ‘jump’ off the end of the line, searching for the start of the next one. It fatigues and slows down the reader (or makes them give up entirely). For longer texts, you should aim for between 8–13 words per line for comfortable reading. The white space of the margins is, in a very real sense, a comprehension tool. Be careful not to crowd the page if you have to adhere to a standard printer paper size, such as A4 or US Letter. Leave some room for the eye to rest. Don’t set the column too narrow either. A large newspaper page with different articles across many columns is another story. For optimal reading of a professional paper, you use the space available. Both for presenting text and figures, but also for some breathing room.