Written by Andy Young for 52 (Thanks Andy!)
I was recently in Paris, where one day walking out of Gare du Nord train station I was able to come out of a serious sugar coma long enough to notice something; Parisians like fonts! Don’t get me wrong. New York works in no other font than Helvetica, and we heart NY for it. Paris though doesn’t play favorites, and has a neon letterpress of imagination to prove it. It’s as if the gleaming glass cases of croissants weren’t enough, and they just had to put the word patisserie in just the right font, with just the right kerning, to have you floating in on a trail of steam and butter… Wait, before I start thinking I’m writing for Food and Wine I should get back to the subject at hand…
Kerning. That’s a big word for a copywriter. It’s also one of many that I think we should be saying and talking about with our art directors as we write. Maybe it was the lights, or the language or the fact that I am totally and unabashedly in love with carbs, but I swear I walked into cafés based just as much on what was on their windows as what was in them.
For the rest of that trip anything I wrote on my laptop I chose a font for and tried to use kerning. I knew full well that most, if not all of those pieces would end up differently, but it helped me to find the right creative space from which to literally view them.
I’ve been fortunate enough to do some work for restaurants, and I think that this concept works especially well for menu writing. Let’s take the word Crème Brûlée and a description, put them in a very normal font in bold and italics, and kern them in different ways.
The examples above are a 20 point font unkerned, 4 points expanded and 4 points/6 points expanded respectively. In the text that is kerned to 6 points expanded, we can begin to see certain words “pop.” When written with key words in mind, this could be an effective way to produce a kind of subliminal SEO. Fonts are more for our own inspiration than anything else, but even still the results are two fold:
- Even if by osmosis, these choices affect your decisions as you write.
- You will began to have a common vocabulary with your art director
I don’t think we always give enough weight to a common creative vocabulary. Have you ever seen someone who’s not a drummer try to explain to a drummer what the intention for a piece is? It’s a pathetic exercise that ends in slobbering, babbling and convulsing. With this in mind, find the time to get to know the basics of design with your art director and use it in your writing. Your words will thank you for it.
For more from Andy visit: www.andrewryoung.blogspot.com
Tags: creative jobs, culture, Travel