Learning from Print Typography with Diana Varma

💌 Newsletter with weekly font recommendations
pimpmytype.com/newsletter
Typography for print can be intimidating to many designers, especially when you focus on digital mostly. This is why I invited specialist Diana Varma to share her knowledge of what to pay attention to when dealing with type for print.
You will learn:
🤩 The advantages of print over digital.
🤩 The differences between readability and legibility.
🤯 The right font sizes & smallest type size you can print (blew my mind).
🤩 How to avoid beginners mistakes in prepress.
🤩 How to best print gray text?
🤩 Accessibility is also a topic that comes up quite a lot during this talk.
🔗 Show Notes
pmty.pe/talk05
🎙️ Diana’s Podcast Talk Paper Scissors:
talkpaperscissors.info
▶️ How to choose a good typeface for body text
• Body Text - How to Cho...
📞 Book a typographic coaching call:
pmty.pe/coaching-call
Chapters
00:00 Intro
02:19 Greetings to Diana Varma
06:09 How Diana’s podcast got started
09:13 Advantages of print typography
14:35 Ideas for digital/analog hybrids
17:02 Type choice for long reading formats in print
22:12 Right font size for print (point or pixel?)
26:00 Basic tips for print beginners
33:04 How to best print gray text
36:59 Knowing the fundamentals to break the rules
39:07 What fascinates Diana about typography?
41:11 Why Diana prefers Comic Sans over Papyrus
43:08 Wrap-up and Easter eggs on Diana’s website
44:52 Outro
#typography #printing #typeforprint

[@soulcostume]

No wonder why she is an educator! Diana is articulate and witty, you have to have that "something" to get the attention of your students. 👏🏻👏🏻 When I started studying Visual Communication Design back in 2006. I didn't know what I'm signing up for. I was taught graphic design but 50% of my studies were a theory of aesthetics, history of film, picture analysis, etc. Kudos to anyone who does print design today. It's not an easy task to switch from a minuscule format on screens and imagine the fit in the actual physical environment. In my country, print design still dominates. While the whole world goes heavy on the metaverse 😆 More of these interviews, please! Happy holidays type people🤗

[@PimpmyType]

So happy you enjoyed the interview, Jana! And I think we all don’t really know what we sing up for when we start studying. I thought graphic design was only about drawing 😅.

[@nigelblumenthal]

I subscribed to PimpMyType only recently, and I've started discovering the talks. Tonight I've been listening to Talk 05, with Diana Varma. Apart from being very attractive and having a great smile, she is clearly very knowledgeable about her subject, and she's an excellent communicator. One of the issues she addressed was the tiny printing on some products, often pharmaceuticals, and that reminded me that, as an original Englishman (and I suspect the same is true of you as a German) I find the North American practice of using UPPER CASE fonts tor a lot of product information to be very annoying. I find it difficult to read, especially in small font sizes, and it doesn't do its job of communicating very well at all. Clearly designers know about this issue, because most highway signs, which need to communicate very quickly, are in upper/lower case; I find that, in some places where only upper case is used, it takes me longer to read and absorb the information on the sign. I wonder why that is. Of course, it's nothing to do with the size of the font, but there must be some other psychological effect at work.

[@PimpmyType]

Thanks for your comment, Nigel! You are right by your observation. All caps text is harder to read because it shapes less distinct words compared to mixed case. It is only a long rectangle by its outline. Ascenders and descenders create a more distinct word shape. And since we read in jumps and recognize these word shapes, it is easier with mixed case. We also discuss the science of reading in my conversation with Eleni Beveratou kzbin.infooaj7aItkj14?si=_ImaIrqau1A91a2h