Dear Karel,
Of course you are right. There is a lot written and substantial bodies of research about typography, legibility, readability, aesthetics and other properties of type and layout. Yes of course differences between readers, and different reading purposes and topics of content and many other things matter if one is trying to make a universal theory about the design of all documents. I can see that this matters if one is at the top of the market and working with large budgets and time.
My practical experience is at the more commodity end of the market and my experience is what is there in the design research literature on these topics doesn't help an awful lot. I'm guessing other designers are finding the same.
Pragmatically, thinking about the situation, I find it useful to differentiate the research literature on design into Basic/Fundamental, Applied and Clinical. Much of the design research literature relating to document design seems to be either a contribution to Basic/Fundamental theories (e.g. Beyer in your list), or is highly specific clinical research (e.g. Joo Hei Kim's topic in your list).
Basic/Fundamental and Applied research are useful in general terms, but they don't have the necessary specificity of clinical research in a clinical practice design situation. It is clinical research that gives the guidelines for design practice.
The problem of clinical research, however, is that it is not general and doesn't apply beyond its clinical context. Clinical research specific to one practice problem does not transfer easily to a different practice problem. That is, what is needed is clinical research exactly on the specific design practice of interest (in this case, designing double column books to be compact, readable and attractive). It appears there is an lack of clinical research specifically on designing layout of double column books, in spite of there being lots of research publications relating to nearby topics.
Second, and refreshing in its way, is the fact that a book is a concrete object. There may be lots of different readers with different characteristics needs and habits, and lots of different contextual factors that shape how a book is read BUT there is only one version of a book. With a book it’s a case of like it or lump it.
Rather than being a design situation of adapting the details of the design to align carefully and exactly with the nuances of multiple and varying user behaviours and contexts, the design of a book has to be a hack that fits as best possible and with the least failures to a lot of different uses, contexts and users. This is quite refreshing after design of (say) websites with adjusting the design to fit accurately for differing cultures, devices, user groups and personas, reader preferences, varying skill levels, disabilities, aesthetics of the moment and other factors. This difference is reflected in the type of pragmatically crude clinical research needed for identifying best practices for designing double column books.
Third and perhaps even more pragmatic, is the matter of money and time for the jobbing designer typesetting textbooks.
Books are increasingly ephemeral. Print runs and book lives are shorter and margins are tighter. This squeezes the allowance for typesetting. The going rate for typesetting a 250 page $50 textbook with a print run of 1000 copies is around $500 and falling. Typical time allowance is 10 hours or less start to handover. This means there is little time for any designer to undertake research or evaluate many multiple options for user optimising a design.
It offers, however, opportunity for design researchers to undertake specific clinical research and identify best practices in designing double column books that can be either used as design guidelines or adapted into the typesetting software. When those research findings and design guidelines are available they enable designers to offer more bang for the buck - or at least have more of a chance of earning a living. Such research and its findings will necessarily need to be correct, robust and reliable and be based on relatively coarse data foundations ( because more finely granulated data sources are not likely to offer additional benefit).
Best wishes,
Terry
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Dr Terence Love
Love Services Pty Ltd
PO Box 226, Quinns Rocks
Western Australia 6030
Tel: +61 (0)4 3497 5848
Fax:+61 (0)8 9305 7629
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-----Original Message-----
From: [log in to unmask] [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Karel van der Waarde
Sent: Monday, 1 December 2014 4:08 PM
To: PhD-Design - This list is for discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design
Subject: Re: Request - resources on double column setting of books
Dear Terry,
Thanks for your message and question. Before people embark on this research journey, it might be worth considering a few things.
a. There are a few dozen PhD theses about typographical dimensions and readability already. It is likely that there are several hundred of MA-theses on this topic. Just to name a few relevant PhD theses:
- Ole Lund “Knowledge construction in typography: the case of legibility research and the legibility of sans serif typefaces” (Reading University, 1999)
- Sophie Beyer “Typeface legibility: towards defining familiarity” (Royal College of Arts, 2010)
- Rob Waller "The typographic contribution to language' (Reading, 1989)
- Jeanne Louise Mois’s “Typographic meaning: readers’ impressions of patterns of typographic differentiation” (Reading, 2012)
- Catherine Dixon "A description framework for typeforms: an applied study” (The London Institute, UK. 2001)
- Joo Hei Kim The Influence of Typographic and Color Variables on Computer Legibility for the Aging (University of Minnesota, US. 1999).
- Femke Straatsma "Typically typographic: the effects of typographic layout on the processing of product advertisements” (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Nl, 2009)
- Beth Elynn Koch “Human emotion response to typographic design” (University of Minnesota, 2011)
Most of these will shed some light on your question. Jeanne Louise Mois is probably most interesting because she proves that the page layout has an immediate effect on the expectations of readers. Their expectation about the contents will change when you go from a one column to a two column layout.
And there are also several dozens of PhDs on reading behaviour (= how people read texts), and PhDs in non-English languages.
b. A first fundamental problem with your suggestion is that it assumes that there are ‘a single standard type of reader’ and ‘a single standard way of reading’. Both are incorrect.
** Unfortunately, both assumptions are common. There are very few books about typography and readability that include a chapter/paragraph/sentence on the act of reading by people. Most - nearly all - typography books ignore readers/people completely. And if there is an indication that there are ‘people who read texts’, they are seen as one single mass. None of the typography books suggests that there are differences between young/elderly, native speakers/non native, experienced/inexperienced, knowledgeable/ignorant. [Most people are illiterate in most languages and in most topics.] That seems to me a serious omission.
** The characteristics of readers are important because they influence reading behaviour. The influence of characteristics like eye-sight, memory, and attention can be easily observed when observing elderly people who read. [I’ve done a few interviews/obervational studies to find out how elderly read medicine leaflets.] People vary the distance between test material and their eyes, people scan a layout in different ways, people have different abilities to read. And there are main differences between ‘existing knowledge’ (experienced patients/newly diagnosed), language (mother tongue? second language?), and interest (personal relevance). People are amazingly flexible when it comes down to reading: they try to decipher almost everything.
c. A second fundamental problem with your suggestion is that you expect that there is some sort of a typographic standard for all ‘double column books’, independent from the contents, language, or purpose. Gutenberg’s bible (42 line) would be a nice example of such a book? Wittgenstein’s Tractatus also uses two columns, albeit of different widths. Or should we just take an excellent recent academic publication on ‘A history of chromolithography’ by Michael Twyman, completely set in two columns? The typographic layout, dimensions, paper quality, margins, and all the other variables differ in each of these books. And they differ for a reason: they try to present the information as good as possible and try to enable readers to interpret a text. Sometimes that is a bible-text in latin on vellum, sometimes as columns of different widths, and sometimes to accommodate very substantial amounts of text in a tome that can just be physically handled.
d. Single variable research in typography and guidelines.
Although the history of typographical empirical research is fairly well documented (see for example the extensive lists in Herbert Spencer’s The visible word), it is very problematic. Ole Lund’s thesis shows this. Even if there would be a range of optimal values for the typographic specification of double column books, it would not be very useful in practice. The reading patterns change as soon as you add an illustration or a heading. Dealing with headings and subheadings, illustrations, contents pages, indexes, references, and notes will influence the way people perceive and use a text. Focussing on the text specification only will not help book designers.
Yes, I fully agree that research is essential to increase our knowledge about the ways in which people read texts, an about the ways in which designers specify texts.
Best practice for the design of publications at the moment is “critically consider the available guidelines”, AND to use an iterative process of ‘observing, designing, testing’. The first question should be: “What do readers have to achieve when they read this particular material?”. It is very likely that a ‘book with two columns’ is not really the most suitable format. But I’m not the right person to tell: you’ve got to ask your readers.
Kind regards,
Karel.
[log in to unmask]
>>>>
> On 1 Dec 2014, at 04:43, Terence Love <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> Dear César, João, Gunnar, David, Carlos, Verdian, Ken and all,
>
> Thank you for all your inputs on better type-setting a double column book.
>
> My core issue is to increase word density (words/page) by around 10% and at the same time increase readability and make the visual appearance more relaxed and attractive, i.e more white space. Double column layout seems to offer a way forward. This reduces page count by better management of wasted line space. It also improves readability by reducing word count per line. Potentially, it also gives more white space and structure.
>
> My interest was in getting research findings specific to double column layout and how best to set type for it that differs from single column layout.
>
> Thus far, it seems there is lots of generic research material on readability and type. Within that are lots of contradictions that are even more contradictory ion 2 column layout. For example, Rudi de Lange's research shows conventions about relative value of serif/non-serif are not so straightforward. The writings about using x-height as a better measure of readability are broken by the reality that very small point sizes in some traditional small x-height fonts from the past seem to have excellent readability. Another contradictions is that some believe centre margins should be less than edge margins because they effectively count twice on an open book. Other believe the opposite.
>
> In contrast, there appears to be a shortage of solid research on any of these and many other topics as they relate to optimising double column book layout and typesetting. So, back to using the eyeballs and comments from others on different prototypes as Gunnar suggested.
>
> This topic is one of the most simple that can be sorted in design research. It's an ideal Masters by Research or PhD research project.
>
> The obvious way forward is to identify the main dimensions (margins, type class, type size/leading, page ratio, heading style, etc ), create a set of samples with 3-4 variants of each and test a mix of quantitative (reading speed, comprehension, etc) and qualitative (ease of reading, attractiveness etc) assessments and create an n-dimensional map showing optimal regions.
>
> This gives a straight path, design research findings -> design guidelines.
>
> Please?
>
> Thanks to everyone for their input, and as always to Gunnar for his sense of mischief.
>
> Best wishes,
> Terry
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