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It’s funny how the smallest things in design can be HUGE in application.

For instance, we are ‘playing’ with some new fonts for some of The Escape marketing stuff and last week we tested them with a group of people to help us choose between two very similar looking typefaces.

It was an interesting exercise, showing people two very similar typefaces, between which they probably didn’t really see that much difference apart from an instinct to like one over another. That said, when 80% of the people prefer one, it doesn’t strike me as coincidence.

In fact, one comment was that one font was friendlier than the other. So, we had a winner - VAG-Rounded.

Anyway, I digress. I wanted to start by creating some internal posters and this is where it gets interesting, because most people think of text as something small - 12 point Times - but here we were moving up, not much, to 70pt. As you can see, below is a sample of the font, which highlights where detail is needed.

The kerning (the way the letters sit together and the space in between) is sometimes way off, as was the case here. Look at the spacing between the Z and the E, compared to the F and the Y. Much time was spent getting it right across a couple of paragraphs.

Unfortunately, the advent of computers and desk-top publishing has taken away the old art of typography and this is now a much overlooked process. People tend to type in their text and let the computers do the rest.

The problem is, it does matter. It matters a lot to me and it’s something this geek can see like a sore thumb. And, I saw it in full effect last night when I saw a logo, not one of ours I might add, on a 30 foot banner. Those small spacing anomalies suddenly end up being inches.