Set in Style

Yesterday — in our search for a way to set very legible type on a real image — we went from this:

To this:

We did much to improve legibility, but we had to use more space.

Now the question is this: can we set the type so it’s legible and compact? That’s our goal.

So far, we’ve viewed our green type against a medium blue and light beige background. How would it look against a medium green background?

Another way of asking that question is this: what if there were hardly any contrast at all between the type and the current background?

Then we’d have this:

That doesn’t work at all.

We can change the color of the type so it has a strong contrast with a known image, but — since we don’t know what the image might be — we know can’t find a color that works with all images. Whatever color we pick could be a big part of the image.

Let’s see if we can make the type legible without changing its color.

Let’s add a drop shadow, like so:

That drop shadow goes a long way toward solving the problem of very low contrast between image and type.

Is there another effect we could use that yields better results?

Yes. Consider what happens when we add an outer-glow effect:

Very legible, right?

Now, let’s see if we can maintain legibility while putting more characters into a smaller space.

Here’s what happens when we make the type less bold:

Note that the type uses less space when we make it less bold.

Here’s what happens when we condense the type:

And here’s what happens when reduce the size of the type:

Not bad. It doesn’t require any more room, and it’s certainly more legible, than the image we started with:

That’s it for now. Tune in next time for more on how to set type on image.

In our last episode, we continued our discussion about combining type with a real image — an image you could capture with a camera.

The starting point for our discussion (Type & Image) was this combination of type and image, which simply doesn’t work:

What we’re going to do next is see how to set type on an image — any image at all — so the image looks good, and so does the type.

To be set in style, your type must be extremely legible.

Suppose you want to set variable copy on a variable image (as in Nutter McClennen & Fish LLP’s home page). Suppose there’s no restriction on the image — it could be anything, dim or bright, colorful or drab, busy or flat.

How do you set the copy so it’s always legible on any background?

In other words, how do you set subtitles to a foreign-language film so they’re always easy to read?

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Have you ever watched a foreign language film with subtitles and been annoyed that they were so difficult to read at times? I’ll bet you have.

Imagine seeing a film with subtitles and thinking, “gee, these subtitles are really well done. Very legible.” You’ve never done that, have you?

That’s because type is not the sort of thing you notice unless it’s not set right. When it’s done right, you don’t even think of it.

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We’re going to use the following image of the Supreme Court building for the rest of our discussion on combining type with a real image:

Let’s begin by setting some thin white type on a portion of the image like so:

The type is legible on a flat, dark blue background, but not on a busy background that offers little contrast.

So, how can we set the type so it’s most legible? We see that white type doesn’t work. How about black type?

That doesn’t seem to be much better.

Let’s see — could we set the type in some color that has high contrast with everything in this picture? How about bright green?

That doesn’t work, and nothing does. There’s just no way to set type in one color so it’s legible over the image. Even if we could, it wouldn’t work for all images (imagine one with lots of light green in it), which is what we’re looking for.

Suppose we set the type bold? Would that work?

That’s better, but it’s still far from being very legible.

Suppose we add a drop shadow?

That helps. But it’s not enough.

How about even bolder type?

And then suppose we set a very different shadow to all the type (even though it appears as though it’s only applied to some of it).

Now we’re getting somewhere. Just compare the comp above to the one we started with.

But you can see the problem we’ve run into: we can’t put nearly as much text on the image as if we were using lighter type.

In our next episode we’ll see if this problem can be resolved.

Yesterday,  we examined this comp (below) in which copy (foreground) was knocked out of a photo (background).

Obviously, the comp’s a dud: thin white type on a light yellow background is hard to read, and that’s not a very good way to market professional services (or much of anything). Better yet, it’s a terrible way to say what you do.

Compare that to this comp from the same site:

Much easier to read, is it not?

Before we get into it, let me ask you this — Did you look at some TV commercials like I said you should?

You really need to.

If you haven’t, then before you read any further, look at some commercials. Look for type on a real image, static or moving. Go do it now, before you read any further.

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First, study this image with a snippet of copy knocked out of it; it appears at the home page of a law firm’s web site.

If you have a recording of a Super Bowl broadcast, gt get it and cue it to the start of halftime.

If not, turn on your VCR or DVD and record some commercial TV. Then start a big pot of coffee.

Once the coffee’s brewed, grab a cup and stop recording.

Have a seat and browse what you recorded. Look for images with knock-outs (in which the type is lighter than the image) or overprints (where the type is darker than the image).

Compare the images in which the type is very easy to read with those in which it’s not so easy to read.

If you can, describe the differences between them.

Then tune in tomorrow, and we’ll start looking at how to combine type with images so the type not only looks good, but is easy to read.

My experience is that many attorneys are dead wrong.

They think the best writing is what most people (including other attorneys) can’t follow, so they turn out the sort of convoluted, long-winded constructions that make professional writers wince, like this nonsense:

The term of this Agreement shall commence on the date hereof as first written above and shall continue in effect through December 31, 2007; provided that commencing on January 1, 2008 and each January 1 thereafter, the term of this Agreement shall automatically be extended for one additional year unless not later than twelve months prior to such January 1, the Company shall have given notice to Employee that it does not wish to extend this Agreement (which notice may not, in any event, be given sooner than January 1, 2008 such that this Agreement may not terminate prior to December 31, 2008); and provided, further, that notwithstanding any such notice by the Company not to extend, this Agreement shall automatically continue in effect for a period of 24 months beyond the then current term if a Change in Control (as defined in Section 3(i) hereof) shall have occurred during such term.

My experience is that the clerks and judges who have to read what attorneys write don’t appreciate convoluted, long-winded constructions. They value their time, and they don’t like to waste it trying to determine if a sentence is well formed, or not.

Why can’t everyone write a brief like this? This attorney wrote just enough, and not one bit more.
— Anonymous, Law Clerk in San Francisco.

If you think what’s hard to read is what’s well written, then ponder this article (“Five Ways to Write Like John ”) by Ross Guberman, a legal writing pro.

You might be interested in Wayne Schiess’s Ethical Legal Writing and you just might like to visit (but never be featured in) the Legalese Hall of Shame.

I’m convinced that the most difficult skill for any lawyer to master is the ability to write with simplicity and clarity.
— Mike Dillon, General Counsel for Sun Microsystems.

Well . . . if you’re an attorney and you think (or you’ve been taught to believe) that bad writing (e.g., way too much copy and awkwardly arranged) is good (e.g., worth hundreds of dollars per hour to generate), then read:

• Legal Writing in Plain English
• Legal Writing: Sense and Nonsense
• What Makes for Good Legal Writing
• Wordsmithing

I recently asked John Gillies, the director of practice support at Cassels Brock & Blackwell LLP, for his thoughts on lawyers, how they write what they write, and what attorneys — especially the least experienced among them — can do to improve their writing skills.

If you’re a young associate, listen up. John’s been at it for a while, and he’s got style.

Tell us a bit about the work you do.

The primary focus of the work that my colleague and I do is to help lawyers practice more effectively and efficiently by finding ways to eliminate the barriers that prevent them from doing that. So, while a part of our work involves traditional knowledge management (KM), it’s broader than that. (Our concept of “practice support” is, therefore, quite different from how that term is used in U.S. firms, where I believe the term is used more in connection with practice group support at the tactical and logistical level.)

Our KM activities have, until recently, focused on two primary activities: developing precedent banks and creating repositories of annotated lawyer work product. (There is often an expertise location aspect to KM activities as well.)

The major drawback to this approach, in my view, is that it focuses on a just-in-case model of content delivery, where time and effort are devoted to capturing content without knowing exactly who might use it or under what circumstances, as well as how valuable it might be to the ultimate user.

While there is still a role for these traditional activities, our focus has been much more on trying to address the obstacles that lawyers actually face in getting their work done effectively and efficiently.

The first thing I did when I arrived at my firm was to hold focus group meetings with a large number of lawyers, paralegals, students, and assistants to ask them what those obstacles might be. (We ended up talking to about one third of the lawyers at the firm.) From their responses, we developed a practice support strategy, aligned with the firm’s strategic plan (obviously!), to address the priority items we discovered from that process.

Given the rise of social media, will writing skills be more or less important in the future?

On the one hand, I would like to be optimistic and think that the proliferation of writers, particularly on the Internet, means that readers have greater exposure to a wider variety of articles. The quality of that writing is going to vary from excellent to execrable. That should mean that high quality writing can distinguish itself more easily from the dross. So, assuming that readers will tend to migrate to well written content, that might imply that the good will tend to drive out the bad.

On the other hand, if I’m pessimistic, then we’re actually moving towards a “twitterization” of communication, so that what is valued most is brevity. It’s almost impossible to demonstrate your superior writing skills if you’re limited to 140 characters. If that’s the case, then readers won’t be able to distinguish the good from the bad because it will all look the same.

Having said that, I know from experience that there are always those for whom good writing and proper use of grammar is important; for them, the bad stuff is an immediate turn-off. (I know; I’m one of them.)

I would like to think that discerning readers will tend to be more highly concentrated among decision-makers, so the investment in good writing that impresses them can potentially pay dividends.

Having said that, I must acknowledge that I have absolutely no scientific basis to back up my speculation.

Law firms, especially the larger ones, function as publishers. Why do so few firms have editors?

For starters, lawyers (and the firms they work in) tend not to see the business development benefits of writing for a non-legal audience. Even the business development benefits of traditional personal marketing (such as joining the Lions Club) are hard to quantify. So a perhaps unstated question is, what’s the payoff for my doing this sort of writing?

As well, most non-professional writers (not just lawyers) can be extremely prickly about suggested editorial changes to their drafting, perhaps because of insecurity about the quality of their writing.

So, if the payoff for writing for a non-legal audience is far from obvious and the clearest result of hiring an editor would be that you’re being told that your writing isn’t good enough, why would you choose to add another person to the payroll (in other words, the editor) to perform that role?

Why are so many lawyers such bland writers?

I should clarify that, while there may indeed be bland writers amongst lawyers writing for a general audience, there are a good number of very accomplished writers who write for a legal audience.

From the first day of law school, the focus of one’s career is, in fact, on legal writing, which is clearly a different beast from “normal” writing. The audience for legal writing is other lawyers, whose writing (not surprisingly) is in a similar style.

So, just as different magazines (like The New Yorker or The Economist) have their own house style, lawyers too have developed a house style, except our “house” extends to all lawyers who have ever existed (“together with all those who may from time, now or in the future, exist, including without limiting the generality of the foregoing,…”).

When those same writers turn to writing for a non-legal audience, though, it becomes more difficult to turn off the house style. As well, it is easier to write about legal issues using the same intellectual framework and language that you use to analyze those issues.

Finally, as any good novelist or non-fiction writer will attest, good writing is just plain hard work. Since there are no clear incentives to writing for the non-legal market, it’s hard to justify spending the time going through numerous drafts to arrive at something that reads well for that market, particularly if you don’t do it on a regular basis.

What can a lawyer do (what should a lawyer do) to further develop his or her writing skills?

There are several possible steps. It’s most important to realize that writing for the general public is fundamentally different from writing for an audience of lawyers. In other words, the style and approach of writing a legal update is nothing like what is needed when drafting a contract, a litigation document, or a law journal article. To help get there, it’s very useful to read and analyze business-related articles in leading publications that cater to an educated readership (such as The New York Times or The Economist).

It will be very quickly apparent that the authors for those sorts of publications don’t do all sorts of things that lawyers are used to doing in their legal updates, such as using case citations, having large numbers of Capitalized Terms for even the Most Obvious Things, or using convoluted language. Those authors take pains to make their points clearly, concisely, and logically.

Next, I would recommend reading good quality content of any type that interests you. If you like novels, then read good novels. If your preference is more for non-fiction, then read good-quality biographies or histories, or periodicals such as The New Yorker or The Atlantic Monthly. Pay particular attention to especially well written passages; take some time to analyze what makes them work.

Finally, there are books that can help guide you, and several legal drafting blogs, like Ken Adams’s Adams Drafting, and Ben Oppipari’s Literary Legs.

What about law schools? What could they do to better equip their students for the real world?

Their focus is on an academic discipline, to turn out law profs, and only incidentally to graduate people who choose to practice law.

I’m not sure most law schools are interested in developing writing skills so their graduates will communicate clearly. (Indeed, if you took a cross-section of academic writing generally, I don’t think you’d conclude that academics strive for clarity and comprehension in their writing!)

You say many lawyers are insecure about their writing skills. How does that affect their work?

Most people enjoy working at developing the skills they are strong at and tend to avoid what challenges them and makes them feel inadequate. Writing good, “pure” legal content (such as contracts or pleadings) is something on which we focus a huge portion of our energies. But good writing is hard work. And, as I said, writing for a non-legal audience is significantly different from legal writing.

Particularly with so many other needs pressing on their time, it’s a tall order to ask lawyers to devote time to doing something that many know they don’t do well.

Does it do a lawyer any good to write a client alert or an article for a newsletter? Does anyone really read that stuff?

Absolutely! It’s valuable to write for a non-legal audience, for at least three reasons. First, writing for that audience forces you to understand your content well enough that you can explain it to someone who doesn’t have your legal background. Ironically, it can end up making you more knowledgeable about your subject matter.

Second, the skills that you develop in improving your writing for this audience will necessarily transfer over to your legal drafting. The goal in both cases is to make your writing clear and understandable.

Third, and this addresses your second question, surprisingly, people do actually read this stuff. The increasing reliance on Internet search to find relevant content means that the potential scope for your item is much broader than in the “old days,” when print was the only way to reach your audience. Plus, as I’ve said elsewhere, while clients and potential clients are unable to judge the substantive quality of the legal documents that we produce, they can judge how well we write the articles addressed to them. So, your good writing gives potential clients a good reason to choose you over someone else.

I think that it’s very easy for lawyers to get trapped by their legal writing, which they generally do very well, and end up writing everything as if it were for a legal audience. In a sense, those writers assume a very high level of understanding and analysis on the part of the reader, but it’s often over the heads of the general audience, who have not generally gone to law school.

You said earlier that good writing is hard work. What do you mean?

If you read interviews with people who write for a living, they almost all say that good writing is hard work. They will devote hours to ensuring that they have chosen the right words, put together the best way they can, to bring to life some sort of a picture in words.

Certainly there are some exceptions, but as a rule, particularly if one accepts the premise (described most recently in Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers) that it takes at least 10,000 hours of dedicated practice to develop expertise, most lawyers have not been able to devote that amount time to this activity. That shouldn’t stop you from trying, though, but you need to recognize that skillful writing does not simply come from writing a few legal updates.

What’s your advice to those now entering the profession? Should they be blogging to increase their visibility, or are they better off working the more traditional business development avenues?

I wouldn’t start a legal blog if I were just starting to practice law. I think a legal blog should pick a niche and focus on providing useful information to people who are interested in the topic and then engaging readers. When you’re starting out, you won’t know enough about a particular niche to speak about it with confidence and authority.

But that doesn’t mean that you have to wait years before you start writing. On the contrary, you should seize every opportunity that presents itself to write for a general audience (and create as many additional opportunities as you can). Hone your craft while your writing is still under the radar, as it were. Then as your technical legal skills have developed to the point where you can start blogging about your particular passion, you will be much further along in your writing abilities.

The two most important things, though, are to write in a way so that readers will want to come back, and to engage with your readers. (Kevin O’Keefe has written a lot about engaging with your blog readers.)

Fundamentally, you are doing the same thing if, say, you join the Lions Club: meeting with people, finding out what they’re interested in, and doing what you can to give them some general advice that they might find helpful. You need, of course, to respect the rules of professional conduct that govern communications by lawyers and, if you’re with a firm, whatever your firm’s social media policies are. But all the successful legal bloggers are able to do that.

What you will find is that, over the long term, your blog will serve as your own personal knowledge management repository. Doug Cornelius, who runs the KM Space and Compliance Building blogs, has written about how his first blog was simply a way to catalogue his own thoughts and content. It grew from there. That’s an important aspect that shouldn’t be overlooked.

Not everyone is cut out to write, though. But I think that those gregarious individuals who feel compelled to reach out to others will see blogging as an ideal medium to do just that.

So, do you have a blog?

Ha, I’ve been caught out! “Do as I say, not as I do.”

Despite what I believe, I have fallen prey to what is probably the most common excuse, namely, “I don’t have the time.” Not that other bloggers, like Mary Abraham and you haven’t encouraged me to start. Let’s just say that it’s something that I plan to do.

Any last words of advice?

Sure: focus on writing well every day, and the benefits will start to become more and more obvious to you. And good luck!

Note: this our last in the series on setting logotype — how to set your firm’s logotype so it displays properly on line, on all devices under all conditions. But don’t fret. We’ve got another series coming up on setting display type on line.

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In our last installment on setting logotype, (Setting Logotype — Part II), we examined why logotypes are usually stored as graphics, rather than text.

Now, let’s see how popular viewers (like web browsers) treat graphics and text differently.

Consider the two words below. The one on the left is text; the one on the right is a graphic (of the one on the left).

One

Zoom way in one this page. As you do, note how the text continues to have smooth edges, but the graphic starts to have rough and fuzzy edges.

Zoom way out of this page. As you do, you can notice the graphic takes on a better appearance than the text; i.e., it has smoother edges than the text.

And the point of all this zooming in and out?

It’s just so you can appreciate my secret recipe for setting good looking logotype, and here it is:

Set your logotype four times larger than it will appear on-screen, and then have the browser shrink it down to size.

That way, it will look it’s best on the greatest number of devices (desktops, laptops, BlackBerries, iPods, iPads, and who knows what’s next) under the greatest range of conditions.

That’s it.

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Oh . . . one more thing — consider large, well known companies, outfits like Coke and Apple and Ford. Look at examples of their logos and logotypes, which appear in many more places than those of law firms. Notice the consistency, and the quality wherever they appear.

There’s a reason for that — big, successful companies really care about how they appear, and for good reason.

If you want to be set in style, your logotype must appear professional. You should be sure it is, especially if you want to seem as one who takes pride in your work.

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Now . . . that’s it! (Unless someone asks “Which graphics format do you use to store the logotype? GIF? PNG? JPEG?”)

In our last installment on logotype, (Setting Logotype — Part I), we noted that logotypes are typically stored as images, rather than as text. Because of that, font smoothing — the process used to make type look good at all sizes — can’t be applied to logotype.

Now we ask, “Why?” Why store logotypes as images rather than as text?

Well . . . there’s a darned good reason for that, and we’ll get right to it.

Previously, we saw this lousy looking logotype from Venable:

Now we’re going to create a good looking version of Venable’s logotype:

In the process, we’ll discover why we can’t store logotypes as text (yet).

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Let’s get started.

To begin, Venable’s logotype is set in Times Roman, in a text style known as caps and small caps.

So, we start by setting the logotype that way:
.

VENABLE

Next, we stretch the type vertically by 50%:

Then, we adjust the spacing between the characters:

Finally, we add the trademark symbol and the LLP:

So, there’s our logotype set to spec.

Why not use the logotype as set. Why store it as an image?

Because we want a browser to display the logotype at the firm’s web site, but browsers — unlike typesetting programs — can’t do all the things we did to set the logotype as text. (Though they will be able to do such things in the near future.)

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Now, zoom way in on this page. As you do, note that the one instance of Venable set as text is the only one that remains nice and smooth at any level of zoom. All the others, being images that can’t be smoothed, look fuzzier and fuzzier the more you zoom in on them.

In our next and final episode, we’ll see what we can do to improve the quality of the logotype at all levels of zoom.

There are several ways to write marketing materials that save readers lots of time, and this introduction to the firm of Bereskin & Parr LLP embodies a few of them:

Bereskin & Parr LLP is a leading Canadian intellectual property (IP) law firm serving clients of all sizes, in a variety of industries, domestic and international. The firm was founded in 1965 and has grown to be one of the largest IP law firms in Canada with four offices located in major economic or technology centers. The firm has offices in Toronto, Mississauga, Waterloo Region and Montréal. Bereskin & Parr is made up of over 70 lawyers, and patent and trade mark agents, many of whom are recognized as leading practitioners in their respective fields. The firm’s practice is comprehensive, encompassing all aspects of intellectual property, with practice groups including:

1. First, throw your readers a curve. One way to do that is to start off with a nice grammatical error, leaving readers to wonder what are “domestic and international industries.”
2. Next, start each and every sentence with the same exact subject, like “the firm, the firm, the firm.”
3. Take a bunch of different thoughts and stuff them into one paragraph.
4. Don’t use transitions.
5. Be sure that no sentence refers to another, and there’s no logical progression from one to the next.

It really works. If you want people to stop reading your copy right quick, be boring, boring, boring.

I notice that quite a few law firms publish PDFs in which the type isn’t rendered properly. Instead, it looks bold and rough unless you zoom in on it, in which case it looks just fine.

Consider the following block of type. The left side is from a PDF published by a Great Big Law Firm; the right side is from the Word document that was the source of the PDF.

The type in the Word document looks fine; the type in the PDF is much heavier and less distinct. To use some highly technical typesetter’s terminology, “it’s got fuzzy type.”

In this case, the problem is that the PDF was saved in the wrong format not produced correctly. But that’s not important here, as there are a number of problems that can prevent PDFs from looking as good as they should.

No, what’s important here is that no one caught the error. They just distributed it to their “friends and clients” with clunky type.

But when your copy’s set in style, that doesn’t happen.

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