I’m doing some research starting from The Bald Soprano, composed by Robert Massin, which is one of my all-time favorite typography books.

I’m interested in studying experimental typographic books that use different typefaces to create distinct voices within the narrative. Do you know of other titles, studies, or projects that explore or push the limits of this approach?

For example, in theatrical texts, beyond the different actors’ voices, there are also asides, often set in italics, or the author’s stage directions.

I’d love to hear your thoughts or any suggestions you might have.

I'm very pleased to share with you all a project that I have been working on for months. I am interested in (a) receiving any feedback that the TypeDrawers community may have, but even more importantly, (b) just sparking some discussion around the topic of typographic systems and design for scholarly text.

A little bit of background:

I am a typographer. My father is a world-renowned expert on the psychology of school shootings and the prevention of violence in schools. For the past seventeen years, we have run the website School Shooters .info. Used by the FBI, the Secret Service, the Department of Homeland Security, hundreds of news outlets, and thousands of ordinary citizens, SS.I is the most comprehensive and trustworthy source of information on the topic in the world.

In terms of design, there are two distinct facets to the site: there is the website itself, and then there are thousands of pages of downloadable PDFs. These PDFs are really the heart of the site, and I will be focusing here on the design of these documents, which are meant to be downloaded and printed.

We first built the website in 2008. Since then, it has gone through several major redesigns and rebuilds. At the moment, ten years after our last redesign, we are again embarking on an overhaul of the site. We will be rebuilding it from scratch on a different platform, adding many new features and a wealth of new data. In tandem with this, I am redesigning and re-typesetting all of the documents that are exclusive to the site — that is, every document that we created ourselves, including scholarly articles, edited primary sources, information graphics, and so on.

If you visit the site now, you will see our soon-to-be-superseded design from ten years ago, both in the webpages and the PDFs. Our new design will be a drastic overhaul and will replace the somewhat lugubrious aesthetic with a fresh, clean, airy, more inviting look. (This was something of a revelation for me as a designer: just because the content is dark, that doesn't mean the aesthetic has to be! On the contrary, the power of design lies in taking such a serious resource and making it accessible and even pleasant to use for the many researchers who rely on it. The scholars and law enforcement folks who use the site don't need to be reminded of the horror of the subject — they just need to be able to do their work efficiently.)

I am now in the final stages of creating our new typographic style for the PDFs. I have learned a lot since our last redesign, and one of the things I have learned is about designing for unpredictability. This is the hardest typographic design project I've ever done, which is why I wanted to share it. Although I've worked on literary journals and similar series designs before, I have never yet designed for an application with quite so many unknowns. As a very small example, designing the opening of an article might seem trivial, until you realize that the article might have:

and the style has to account for every possible permutation.

I have found this process fascinating, and I am increasingly interested in the idea of designing systems for application when the specifics of the text are unknown.

Anyway, as you can see if you compare the documents currently on the site to the manual I've linked to here, we had been using a fiddly and over-designed combination of Scala,* Calluna Sans, Trade Gothic, and Skolar. I have moved us to a single type family, Lyon. The website will also be going all Lyon, all the time. The various layouts used for different kinds of documents have been streamlined into a single layout for everything.

*One of the problems with Scala is that it didn't have the characters we require, such as Vietnamese accents. For such a popular face, it's surprising that the character set has never been expanded. But I was ready for an aesthetic change anyway.

I've taken the opportunity of the in-progress redesign to write our first-ever comprehensive typographic style guide. You can see a draft of the manual here. This aspect of the project alone has taken several months. The result is a 136-page guide to our new style. It has information about the redesign, highly detailed specs, a guide to using the InDesign files, and sample pages.

Although I have been designing books for more than fifteen years, this is the first time I have ever written out typesetting specifications in the traditional way. Since I set my own type, I have never needed to. But this manual is intended to be used by other typesetters in the future, so I had to learn how to write specs. The process was illuminating. Compiling the manual required me to check and second-guess every aspect of the design. Resources that were helpful for writing the specs include Richard Eckersley et al., A Glossary of Typesetting Terms; Rich Hendel, On Book Design; and Andrew Barker, "Backwards and In High Heels," in Rich Hendel, Aspects of Contemporary Book Design. I consciously included much more detail regarding the niceties of composition that a designer traditionally would, because the folks who will have to interpret these specs in the future are not necessarily trained compositors.

Perhaps that's enough of an introduction for now. I may yet write an article about this design process, so I don't want to go on here at too much length. On the other hand, I welcome questions, which may even help me decide what to include in an article.

Re the manual: the draft I have linked to above is, indeed, a draft. Please do not disseminate it. The ten documents that I have typeset so far in the new style, and which form the basis of the "Layouts" section, are currently in proofreading; this section will be updated once they are proofed.

Looking forward to wherever this discussion takes us!

Josh

• A Beginner’s Guide to Chinese Type Design
• Key Numbers & Industry Insights
• The Process of Designing Chinese Typefaces
• Behind-the-Scenes Stories of Chinese Traditional Typefaces
• Tips & Tricks for Working with Chinese Typography

If you're interested, feel free to check it out here (all articles are in English). And, if you find it useful, I’d really appreciate it if you could share it with your type-focused networks to help reach a wider audience. 

https://ref.justfont.com/AHUFM1

Thanks!

Hopefully, it will provide valuable insights and serve as a new resource.
Cheers!

Given that I make very extensive use of InDesign's GREP styles for achieving typographic sophistication and finesse in running body copy, and given that I'm currently in the midst of a project for which I am doing a great deal of GREP engineering, I thought I'd share some of my commonly used GREP expressions with the group.

Each expression below is a GREP query that can be incorporated into a paragraph style in InDesign, so that it applies to all body text in a document. (In the paragraph style options window, go to the tab called "GREP Styles.") These are all expressions that I habitually or commonly apply to all body text in, say, a book or journal. Not all of them will be relevant for all kinds of text, but there's nothing out of the ordinary here. These are the basics that I use to get body text to behave the way I like.

I'm sharing these because they might be useful to other typographers, but also because type designers might be interested in seeing the kinds of things I expect a typeface for body text to do. Perhaps some of my GREP styles will suggest ways that type designers could incorporate some of these features into their fonts themselves.

Here's the list:

Expression:

-~_

Apply: Some percentage of horizontal scaling, e.g., 80%

Result: Shorten em dashes to the percentage of width specified; useful for fonts in which the em dash occupies the full em square, which often looks too wide in text.

Expression:

(?<=\.)~S(?=\.)

Apply: 50% horizontal scaling

Result: Condense nonbreaking spaces within ellipses to your preferred width; effectively creates, e.g., an 8/em nonbreaking space; specify your own dot spacing in ellipses to your taste.

Expression:

\u\u+

Apply: OpenType “all small caps” case

Result: Make acronyms like NASA automatically set in small caps.

Expression:

\u+(?=\u)

Apply: some amount of letterspacing (tracking)

Result: Apply letterspacing to all terms matched by the expression above, except for the last letter (to avoid extra space after the term).

Expression:

(?<=\u)\u(?=[.,])

Apply: same amount of letterspacing as above

Result: Add letterspacing to the last letter in small-caps acronyms, only if followed by a period or comma (to avoid the punctuation seeming too tight against the small caps).

[Note: more sophisticated styles for automating the application of small caps and letterspacing are included below.]

Expression:

(?<!\u)(USSR|USA|UAE|US|UK|AL|AK|AZ|AR|CA|CO|CT|DE|DC|FL|GA|HI|ID|IL|IN|IA|KS|KY|LA|ME|MD|MA|MI|MN|MS|MO|MT|NE|NV|NH|NJ|NM|NY|NC|ND|OH|OK|OR|PA|PR|RI|SC|SD|TN|TX|UT|VT|VA|WA|WV|WI|WY)(?!\u)

Apply: full caps, no letterspacing

Result: Override the auto small caps for postal abbreviations and other geographic abbreviations, like USA, which should remain in full caps.

Expression:

[()[\]]

Apply: roman (not italic)

Result: Force all delimiters () [] {} to remain upright (not italic) in all contexts. Traditional in classical typography.

[Note: the following three queries could be combined, but are separated because often the amount of space desired before punctuation will differ depending on the mark.]

Expression:

.(?=[:;])

Apply: a small amount of letterspacing (tracking)

Result: Add a little extra space before colons and semicolons. Traditional in classical typography.

Expression:

.(?=\?)

Apply: a small amount of letterspacing (tracking)

Result: Add a little extra space before question marks. Traditional in classical typography.

Expression:

.(?=!)

Apply: a small amount of letterspacing (tracking)

Result: Add a little extra space before exclamation points. Traditional in classical typography.

[Note: the following two queries should be used together.]

Expression:

[([{]

Apply: a small amount of letterspacing (tracking)

Result: Add a little extra space after opening delimiters ( [ {.

Expression:

.(?=[)\]}])

Apply: same amount of letterspacing as above

Result: Add a little extra space before closing delimiters ) ] }.

Expression:

~}(?=\d)

Apply: a little bit of letterspacing

Result: Adds a bit of spacing between a closing quotation mark and a superscript note marker immediately following.

Expression:

\x{0026}

Apply: italic

Result: Italicizes all ampersands, regardless of context (per Bringhurst and others).

Expression:

~_(?=~_)

Apply: a little bit of negative tracking (depending on font)

Result: In fonts where em dashes do not connect seamlessly, this removes the space between consecutive em dashes. Useful for bibliographies.

[Note: the following two queries should be used together. They make use of an ingenious solution for preventing unwanted hyphenation that I found on an Adobe discussion board.]

Expression:

\w\w+(?=-)

Apply: InDesign’s “no language” option in character settings

Result: Forces already hyphenated words like “self-esteem” to break only at the existing hyphen and nowhere else.

Expression:

(?<=-)\w\w+

Apply: InDesign’s “no language” option in character settings

Result: Forces already hyphenated words like “self-esteem” to break only at the existing hyphen and nowhere else.

Expression:

(?<=\d\d\d)\d(?=\l[,;)\]])

Apply: a little bit of letterspacing

Result: A smidgen of extra space before the letters in bibliographic citations like “1996a” and “2024b.”

Expression:

(?<=\d\d\d\d)\l(?=[,;)\]])

Apply: italic

Result: Automatically italicize the letters in expressions such as those above: 1996a.

Expression:

(page|pages|p\.|pp\.|figure|figures|fig\.|figs\.|table|tables|chapter|chapters)\K\x{20}(?=\d)

Apply: InDesign’s “no break” option in character settings

Result: Disallows line breaks in the middle of expressions like “chapter 4,” “pp. 21–22,” “fig, 8,” etc.

Expression:

~2

Apply: a small amount of negative baseline shift

Result: Shifts the copyright symbol down to be vertically centered on the height of oldstyle figures.

Expression:

~m~m~m~m

Apply: some decorative “strikethough” style, e.g., a double rule

Result: A handy way to make ornamental section-break rules; just type 4 em quads to make the rule. Adjust as needed for length.

Expression:

(?<!\w)[ABCDF][+~=](?!\w)

Apply: OpenType “full caps” case (case-sensitive forms)

Result: Apply “full caps” to plus and minus signs in grades like A+, B–, to center the signs vertically on the capitals.

[The following two expressions should be used together.]

Expression:

\b\u+-?\d+\b

Apply: OpenType “all small caps”

Result: Apply small caps to the letters in terms like 3-D, AK-47, 221B, A1, A-1.

Expression:

\b\d+-?\u+\b

Apply: OpenType “all small caps”

Result: Apply small caps to the letters in terms like 3-D, AK-47, 221B, A1, A-1.

Expression:

\<[-\u\x{20}'!?,:;][-\u\x{20}'!?,:;]+\>

Apply: OpenType “all small caps”

Result: Apply small caps to extended phrases or sentences in all caps, as in characters shouting. Includes internal punctuation within such phrases.

Expression:

\<[-\u\x{20}'!?,:;][-\u\x{20}'!?,:;]+(?=[-\u\x{20}'!?,:;]\>)

Apply: some amount of letterspacing (tracking)

Result: Applies letterspacing to all sequences matched by the above query, except for the last letter (to prevent unwanted space from appearing after the phrase).

Expression:

\d

Apply: “normal” case and OpenType proportional oldstyle figures

Result: Forces all digits to appear as oldstyle figures. Useful when the font includes special “small cap figures” and you wish to use OSF instead, even in small-cap contexts. Do not include in styles for full-caps headings.

Expression:

(?<=\[).+?(?=\])

Apply: italic

Result: Italicizes phrases within brackets, as for stage directions in scripts and interview transcripts.

That's all for now; I may return to add more at some point. I'll leave the community with a couple of questions:

1. Do other typographers use GREP styles similarly? Does anyone have any particularly useful or clever expressions that I've overlooked? If so, please share.

2. Is anyone else interested in seeing some of the results that I achieve with GREP baked into more fonts via stylistic sets or other OpenType features?

Many thanks,

Josh