HARMONY AND APPROPRIATENESS
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“Leit-motif”—The central idea in composition—Harmony and appropriateness—Undervaluing their importance—What is appropriate?—Discriminating judgment required—Discreet selection of type, ink and paper—It makes a difference—As to type-faces—As to inks—As to papers—Simplicity synonymous with good typography—The ideal printshop—Harmonious type-faces, ink colors and paper stock—Certain amount of contrast desirable—All capitals or all lower-case—Harmony of type-faces and borders illustrated—Typographic sins—In typography there should be a motive—“Is it appropriate?”—An architectural motive—In which strength is the motive—Design suggested by an old lock-plate—Typographic motive found in woodcut borders and initials of early printers—A millinery booklet cover—A page severely plain and non-sentimental—A program for a church service appropriate to the environment—A page in keeping with a festive spirit—Typographers should give support to artists—The Colonial arch and a title-page—The better the typographer, the more restraint will he exercise.
TONE AND CONTRAST
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A story of white and black—A combination popular with writers, printers and readers—Uniformity of tone or depth of color—A mixture of irregular gray and black tones inexcusable—Art principles too often ignored—Contrast necessary, but uniformity should not be sacrificed—Art makes concession to utility—A right way and a wrong way—Unjust blaming of the customer—A German example of uniform tone—Practical demonstration of uniform tone—Four ornaments, upon which four pages are constructed—Contrast, from the viewpoints of art and utility—Lessening the contrast between print and paper—A compromise—Impressing the print firmly on antique paper—Setting the print daintily upon glossy paper—Lack of artistic feeling responsible for unpleasant contrasts—Great contrast is eccentricity—Mark Twain and contrasts—Cover-page should be darker than title-page—The tone of a massed page—Controlled by spacing—Duplicating the tone of a pen-and-ink illustration—A spotted black tone—Equalizing the tone by using lighter ink—Spaced capitals and open-line illustration—A classic interpretation of uniform tone—Characteristics and tone superbly blended—Initial and headpiece should approach the tone of the type page—Uniform tone between display line and border—Catalog illustrations should stand out in relief—Outline type-faces to obtain gray tone on newspaper page—Letterspacing—All lines should be similarly spaced—An unusual heading.
PORTION, BALANCE AND SPACING
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Symmetry is necessary to beauty—What has art to do with printing?—Two views—The book printer and the job printer—Pleasing the few or being all things to all men—Printing as a business and as an art—Art is essential to printing—Study of art arouses ambition—Unfolds a new world—Proportion—Book pages—The width and length of a page—Position of the page—Margins—The job printer and proportion—Relation of shape of type-face to page—Condensed types for narrow pages—Extended types for wide pages—Architecture as an example—Vertical and horizontal lines—The relation of lines to proportion—A page with ornament, type-face and page design in proportion—Irregularity and when it may be introduced—A type line large or small by contrast—The happy medium—Balance, an important subject—Type lines horizontally centered—Safety from blunders—Out-of-the-center balance—The point of vertical balance above center—Testing balance to the limit—Diagonal arrangements show lack of imagination—Spacing—Its proper apportionment—An important feature when letters are designed—The capital L—Emphasis by means of spacing—The effect of separate lines—Should be an even page tone—Distributing display lines over the entire page—Grouping them at the point of balance—Spaced words in narrow measures—A good sign when one recognizes imperfections.
ORNAMENTATION