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Why Font Styling Isn't a Good Idea
Iman holding italic styling vs. italic examplef you've ever used a page layout program you've noticed that one can choose to style fonts (making them bold, italic, etc.) using a style menu or one can choose the actual font from the font menu. The choice seems easy enough. It takes longer to go to the font menu and find say, Futura Bold, than to just bold the Futura regular font you're already using. Why shouldn't designers take the quicker route? There's a few reasons why not.

Though the bolding of Futura Regular might look fine on the screen, it may not print on a laser printer or on a printer's imagesetter when outputting film. Why? Well, it has to do with the fonts and how they were manufactured. If a printer font actually exists for your version of Futura Bold, then the vendor may or may not have set up the font to match up with the type styling menu. Some do and some don't and one can only tell by trying them and then remembering which work and which don't. With hundreds of fonts, their memory will need to be better than mine. Both cases will still look okay on-screen because the program is doing as it's told regardless of how it will print.

The other reason for not using type styling is aesthetics. When a regular or book font is bolded, what you often get is a thicker version of that font. Bold members of a font family have been carefully drawn so that they still retain the aesthetic quality and sharp detail of the regular version. In the case of italicizing, the letterforms are redrawn while the characters still look like a member of the font family. Italic styling a regular version of a font merely slants the font. The characters don't look italic. They look like they're falling over!

Designers should always use the font menu to choose a font style and stay away from style menus. Otherwise, output will be inconsistent and could very likely cause expensive mistakes down the road.slug


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