What’s Your Type? A Guide to Typefaces

Typefaces are the unsung heroes of design; they have the power to grab attention, engage a reader and enhance a message just as much as any image can. Although they may not always be consciously noticed, typefaces have the power to carry subtle undertones, in fact, they can be just as expressive as the words they create, communicating concepts like ‘traditional’, ‘classic’, ‘contemporary’, ‘modern’, ‘chic’, ‘stylish’, ‘serious’, ‘fun’, ‘bold’, ‘understated’ –  and many more besides. 

Choosing a typeface that complements the message and creative approach is only part of the story, the size, spacing and weight of each letter must be carefully balanced by the designer to achieve a perfect end result.

For this week’s blog post, the Holywell studio have put together a brief guide to typefaces, tips on using them and things to consider when selecting them - Click here to download the guide in PDF format. 

Made in Oxford: Holywell helps CTSU with Oxford-China Fellowship conference

At Holywell, we love a challenge, and some projects test our skills on a number of different levels. A recent project for our customer, the Clinical TrialsServices Unit (CTSU) is a great example, calling for a range of competences, and requiring us to coordinate and deliver a range of disparate elements.

Part of the Nuffield Department of Population Health, a major section within the Medical Sciences Division of Oxford University, CTSU’s work chiefly involves studies of the causes and treatment of “chronic” diseases such as cancer, heart attack or stroke, as well as studies of other major conditions in developed and developing countries.

Hosting the Oxford-China Fellowship Conference, an event for Chinese delegates that takes place in Oxford, CTSU briefed us to support them with a package of services which, in addition to producing the conference programme, included printing personalised certificates for delegates, framing them, and providing overprinted jute bags – all while the conference was taking place!

Production of the programmes could not begin until the full itinerary for the Oxford China Fellowship was confirmed, and details were not finalised until immediately before the event was due to take place.  Cue our digital printing press and our perfect binding machine (see lastweek’s blog post for more information) – the perfect solution when we need to create high quality, professionally bound books at very short notice. What made this project a little different for us was that the text supplied for us to create artwork was in Chinese. While the designers in our studio are a very talented bunch, none of them is a fluent Chinese speaker! Not a problem, our customer supplied a Chinese proof reader to sit with our artworker and check our typesetting before we went to press with the full colour, A4, 30 page (26 pages of text and a 4 page cover) programme.

Our next challenge was to produce training certificates for each of the conference attendees, personalised with the delegate’s name and other details. We used high quality, heavyweight (300gsm) paper and printed the certificates digitally. We also sourced wood and glass frames, hand framing each of the certificates individually. Once again, because delegate details were only able to be confirmed last minute, production was carried out while the conference was underway.

The finishing touch for our CTSU project was to supply natural fibre jute ‘goodie bags’ for all delegates. We created artwork featuring the Oxford University crest and the Oxford skyline, and oversaw the screen printing of this image onto both sides of the bags.

By their nature, events are always likely to be subject to late changes, as itineraries, speakers, presentations and attendees can alter right up until the very last moment. Here at Holywell though, our ‘can do’ attitude and our responsive approach to print production means we are used to working under pressure and delivering to extremely tight deadlines.

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Perfect in the short run: Low volume, high quality books printed in hours

How often have you come out of a conference, a seminar or a training meeting clutching a set of stapled handouts run off by the presenter or event organiser?  If you were lucky, they might have even been held together with a plastic spine! Where are they now? The odds are that they stayed in your briefcase or on your desk for a few days or weeks before you filed them in the bin! It’s a sad fact that many excellent events are often let down by the quality of the materials that delegates are given to take away. For one thing, second rate material diminishes the value of the content delivered; for another, it makes it less likely that it will be retained for future reference.

Of course, the reason why handouts are often produced ‘fast and dirty’ is because content – or parts of it at least – may not be known until very close to the event – or perhaps even while it’s still taking place.  But if that’s been your excuse up until now, you can’t use it any longer, because thanks to digital printing and our perfect binding machine, we’re able to create book quality documents in a matter of hours.

The perfect binding process uses hot glue to fix pages together, and the end result is a professionally bound book or booklet that’s almost instantly dry and ready to go out of our door as soon as it comes off the machine.  Creating content pages and covers using our digital press, and then feeding these into our perfect binder, makes it possible for us to be receiving artwork in the morning, and delivering high quality books by lunchtime.

Combining digital print with perfect binding is ideal where a fast turnaround is needed, and using this production method gives us the ability to be incredibly responsive, printing virtually in real-time. But speed is not always the driver – there are plenty of other reasons why you might require low run, high quality print including:

•           Impressive presentation documents for an important meeting.
•               A limited run academic publication.
•               A self-published book, printed on demand.

If you need to produce a professional looking book or document, this process is fast and cost-effective for anything from just one copy - up to a print run of several hundred. Books and booklets are usually printed in A4 or A5 format, as these are the most economic sizes for our digital press, but we can go up to a maximum size of 350mm x 350mm if required. The size of the content should not be an issue either as we can produce books up to 50mm thick.  For a really impressive document, it may be worth considering printing the cover using the lithographic (rather than digital) process. Even if the content is not going to be available to print until the last minute, covers can be litho printed and finished in advance so they are ready to go when the content is finalised. The same principle can be applied to any other elements which might be available in advance, or require special finishing; this might include diagrams, illustrations or photographs for example.

So next time you need to produce low volume, high quality documents quickly, don’t break your desktop printer or burn out the photocopier, call Holywell and do it properly. If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing Holywell!

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