What do you think of this typesetting?
Please pay attention to the font and look at the overall typesetting. Do you feel any discomfort? How can you resolve that discomfort?
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Negative Points
Improvement Plan
Font combinations should aim for consistency or contrast.
When using multiple fonts together, it is not ideal to combine similar fonts. It is better to either create a sense of unity or add contrast.
The left page heading is simple and versatile Helvetica, while the right page heading has a geometric impression with Futura. The body text, other than the heading, is in condensed Helvetica. Mixing Futura here does not seem effective. It is not particularly distinctive and just looks inconsistent.
To create a sense of unity, it is common practice to combine variations of the same font family. Using a condensed font for headings in addition to the body text will further enhance the sense of unity.
On the other hand, if you want to emphasize contrast, combining clearly different fonts such as sans-serif and serif (above), or decorative and body fonts (below) will make the difference stand out.
Unintended Inclusion
One thing that is occasionally seen is the mixing of Helvetica and Arial. The differences in letterforms are so subtle that they may not be noticed, but there is a strange feeling that cannot be described and it does not seem intentional to mix them. It is likely that this happened unintentionally while repeatedly revising over the years or reusing parts from other manuals. We recommend that it be checked once.
>>Translation Services by Human Science Co., Ltd.
>>Related Materials: Machine Translation Translation Errors and 9 Examples of Post-editing & Post-editing Check Sheet
Main Reference Materials
Butterick's Practical Typography (https://practicaltypography.com/mixing-fonts.html)
Kobayashi Akira "Similar Fonts" Type Director's Eye (https://blog.excite.co.jp/t-director/10584464/)
Takaoka Masao "Basics and Etiquette of Western Typesetting" Bijutsu Shuppan-sha, 2010
Author Information
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ISHII GentaMulti-lingual Translation Group
DTP Operator- ・In my previous job, I was in charge of DTP for Asian languages such as Arabic, Thai, and Chinese. I was involved in creating product catalogs and instruction manuals.
- ・Currently, I have expanded my language expertise to cover all European languages and am responsible for not only DTP but also multilingual localization for e-learning.
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