The brand book

Member lesson

Type pages

Lesson 10 of 18 in The brand book.

Lesson

Type pages fail in a consistent way. They show the alphabet at 120 point, name the weights, and never demonstrate a paragraph, which means they specify nothing about the thing the brand mostly does with type.

The left page holds one huge abstract letter-like shape, and the right page shows a heavy headline over rows of grey text lines with brackets and arrows marking line spacing and paragraph width.
One page shows a single giant letter and nothing else; the other sets a headline over body text with its line spacing and width marked. Only the second shows how the type works.
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  1. Question 1, locked

    A type page lists the permitted sizes and nothing else. What goes wrong in production?

    • Designers pick weights at random, since a size implies nothing about weight.
    • The brand font gets substituted, because a size list says nothing about which font.
    • Text set at a correct size with the wrong leading over too long a line.
    • Little, since line height follows from size in every layout tool.
  2. Question 2, locked

    Which of these words means this? “The typeface shown properly, at real sizes, in real text.”

    • Specimen
    • Tiered documentation
    • Testable rule
    • Full manual
  3. Question 3, locked

    Which of these words means this? “The permitted sizes with their line heights and measures.”

    • Scale table
    • Short book
    • The system
    • Awkward case

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