Extreme Makeover: Typography Edition--Part C "The Professional"
And now we come to part three in the exercise.
I originally wondered whether one could improve upon a good judicial opinion just by changing the typography.
Then I took a swing at it, making some fairly radical changes in the original Comptroller v. Attorney General written by Chief Justice Jefferson. This was the result
Now we get an idea what kind of changes someone who knows what they're doing would make.
Matthew Butterick, unlike me, has an undergraduate degree and work experience in the area of font design. Part of what set me off on this experiment was reading his new book, Typography for Lawyers, which is both useful and entertaining. It has reference-type sections that set out the rules and conventions of good typography, as well as historical and entertaining yarns about how we got where we are and why there is almost no escaping Times New Roman font.
In my view, every lawyer who writes enough to own the Bluebook needs a copy of this book too. (All the cool kids have one).
So when I decided I would try my hand at redesigning an opinion, I e-mailed Butterick to see if he would have a go. He consented. After the jump, you get Comptroller v. Attorney General both before and after Butterick.
Maybe I didn't do such an amateurish job. There are some commonalities in both our versions.
- Both reduce the font size
- Both change from Times New Roman
- Both reduce line height
- Both reduce line length
- Both attend to the spacing of the long URLs in the opinion.
But Butterick obviously has some know-how that I lack. There are some super cool tricks revealed in how he did it. Here, in his own words, is how Matthew Butterick went about re-doing the opinion:
The SCT opinion looks a lot like the research memo example in the book. So I followed the recipe there, and threw in a few extra details.
- The SCT's opinion only uses one space after punctuation, so bravo for that.
- Changed font from Times New Roman to Miller (Miller was designed by Matthew Carter, who is best known for Verdana and Georgia. But unlike those fonts — which are optimized for the screen — Miller is optimized for print.
- Overall layout: made the margins bigger, reduced the font size a little, made the lines tighter. If you imagine that would make the document longer, think again — the redesigned opinion fits on two fewer pages than the original.
- Front page. An example of shifting the typographic emphasis toward the right things. For instance, the case number doesn't need horizontal borders around it. The party names are set inside a three-cell table. The little character separating the caption from the opinion is called an asterism and lives in the standard Wingdings 2 font.
- Fake small caps have been converted to real small caps throughout. Kerning has been turned on. Nonbreaking spaces have been added after section marks (so no section mark is left at the end of a line without its reference). Hyphens in page-range references have been converted to en dashes.
- Here's a little tip I didn't put in the book: Footnote references have been changed to use the bold font weight rather than the regular weight. Ordinarily, your word processor will shrink the standard numerals to make footnote references. That leaves them looking somewhat emaciated. If you start with the bold weight, they survive the shrinking process better. I also removed the footnote separator bar.
- The opinion has a lot of URLs in it. I use hard line breaks to break these up. Note that in the original opinion, they don't break, which leads to some odd word spacing. They're also underlined and blue — by default, word processors will apply this formatting. (In the book, I explain how to turn this feature off.)
- A trick I mention in the book, and one of my favorites — headings are bold, but set a half-point smaller than the body text. This moderates the emphasis of the bold type. Headings have more space above than below so they visually sit closer to the text they introduce. Headings are also set to "keep with next paragraph" so they don't get separated from the text that follows — see p. 20 of the original opinion for an example of this problem ("Declaratory Judgment Act" is left dangling)
- Aside from the font, I did everything with stock MS Word tools. All the text-formatting and page-layout choices could be encapsulated into a template that applies them automatically. Most of the type-composition issues can be fixed with global search and replace. So there's really almost nothing that would need to be done by hand the next time, except for putting line breaks in URLs. In other words, having your documents look this good every time is almost the same amount of effort as having them look ugly every time.
And now the big reveal:
- Comptroller v. Attorney General before Butterick
- And Comptroller v. Attorney General after Butterick
Ah, much better. A better looking, more readable document. And I don't think it is just my personal taste in saying that it looks more authoritative as a quality, published text than a typewritten document.
Note Butterick's last sentence carefully. Once you set your template up the way you want it, "having your documents look this good every time is almost the same amount of effort as having them look ugly every time."
So why choose ugly?
Probably, no one chooses to be ugly. We just rely on system defaults and let Bill Gates make the choices for us. This results in ugly, because "If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice."*
*(Now, what other blog can combine nerdiana on the level of fonts and typography with a Rush lyric? I ask you. No need to thank me. I'm just here to help.)
Welcome to the Appellate Record-- --the online community and virtual watering hole for appellate lawyers and anyone else who is comfortable with their inner law nerd.
Now this is a professional redesign. Kendall, I hope you don't mind me saying that I prefer this version. It takes a more moderated approach to margins, line spacing, and headings. (It doesn't make abrupt font switches, either, which strike me more as the realm of poster design than brief design.)
The one quibble I have is with the choice of a delicate print-optimized font rather than a more robust general-purpose font for this particular use. The Court only mails the paper slip opinions to the parties; they no longer print them for the public. The vast bulk of readers just get a PDF file reached through a hyperlink.
I'm still looking for the perfect PDF font that can support both uses, but I'm now quite sure that Miller is not it.
Like I said, this version is what you get when you know what you're doing. He's a pro.
But both are better than the original--especially if I learn from Matthew and moderate some of my choices. Whichever way I wish the Court and its rules would allow for better document design in its opinions and in our briefing.
Thank you to Kendall Gray for shining the spotlight on this excellent resource. "Typography for Lawyers" is hilarious and helpful -- a seldom-found combination in anything that lawyers usually read. Butterick's book should be required reading for all attorneys, just as guru Bryan Garner says in the forward.
Damn your hide! I love this! Now instead of working, I just want to spend today playing with typography. Thank you very much for this series on typography -- I have thoroughly enjoyed it. Keep up the great work!
**Evil Laugh**
Of course, if you play with typography on a client document, you can bill for it and call it work. Fun work, but work.
Great post Kendall! I find that I am able to experiment more in post conviction filings at the trial court level than I am in the Georgia Court of Appeals. It is amazing what white space does to the readability and overall professional look of a document.
Scott
Although I really like the typeface (but I will not be spending $450 to get it), I do not like this layout overall. It looks like someone is trying for the U.S. Reports version for Texas Supreme Court opinions. While there are some nice improvements (like the expensive font), the title page looks amateurish,and I really dislike the oversized margins. I wonder if there is a happy medium?
Ken, it's not good typography because the SCOTUS uses it, SCOTUS uses it because it is good typography. I made the typographic choices in mine first, for example, and a Supreme Court look is just what resulted.
Take a wander back through the posts, especially the one with the big eyeball and Extreme Makeover Part Deux. And read "Painting with Print" on the Seventh Circuit website. The wider margins (shorter line lengths) have been shown to be much more readable with less fixation pauses. Those posts explain where the choices came from. It's not just a matter of aesthetic preference, but what actually works best for human readers.
That said, I do have a format that I use for state trial court briefing which is sort of half-way between SCOTUS on Steroids and the term paper look. I'm thinking of putting a sample of that up in a future post just as something to consider and talk about.
Do you know by chance what size margins were used?
I'm not exactly sure for Matthew's version. For mine, I was trying to approximate 2.23 inch (160.55 point) margins, and Matthew's looks similar to me.
I really like the typeface (but I will not be spending $450 to get it)
You don't need to buy professional fonts to enjoy good typography. But there's a persistent urban legend about their cost. The font I used, Miller Text, is available for $40 per style. If you get the five basic styles (roman, italic, bold, bold italic, small caps), that's $200. Not $450. Again, pro fonts are not mandatory. But when you consider all the ways you could invest money (or time) to improve your typography, pro fonts are a good value.
One thing I don't like about the Miller font is the lowercase "t." It looks like it has been shrunk relative to the other letters, and is distracting. What font was used in the caption -- it's different than the body, at least as far as the "t" is concerned.
What about Century font?