As you may have surmised from the recent lack of blog posts, I’ve been crazy busy – a number of events and projects have all come due at the same time. I thought it would be interesting to talk about the one I’m most proud of: the program design for a musical our church is performing next weekend.

If you’d like to follow along, you can download a PDF of the program here.

The director sent me the logo and text content, and it was my job to lay it out on the page. With my copy of Elements of Typographic Style at hand, here are the steps I followed:

• Figure out the general flow of the program. In this case, it started with the cast list, followed with cast bios, and ended with a thank-you. One design goal was to avoid headings… the reader should be able to figure out the purpose of each section without additional help from me. I settled on a two-sheet (eight-page) layout with the cast bios leading the reader from the cast list to the thank-you on the last page.
• Choose a suitable font. I was conflicted here – part of me wanted to use a sans-serif font to give a whimsical, light-hearted mood in keeping with the subject of the play, but I also needed a font that had oldstyle figures, elegant italics, and a full set of ligatures. Adobe Caslon fit the bill as a full-featured font that is stately and readable yet doesn’t call attention to the letterforms itself.
• Format the lists. Between casts, musical numbers, and supporting crew, this booklet is full of lists. One common tactic is to align each side of the list along opposite margins, then link the two with a line of periods or an underline. Tufte and Bringhurst both agree that such a layout is distracting and hard to use – a far better choice is to align the list along a middle column, leaving both the left and right sides ragged. When text was too long to fit on one line, I used a two-column table (for the list of supporting crew on the back page) or carefully split the text and kept it close to its parent line above (for the list of musical numbers).
• Style text consistently and conservatively. As part of avoiding headings and explanatory text, it was important to have a consistent story for emphasizing and relating text to each other. In this case, I used italics throughout the program when a member’s character name or role was listed. Bold was used only to highlight names in the cast bio section, and never on top of already-italicized text. Restraint when applying character styles goes a long way toward aiding readability.
• Enable ligatures, optical kerning, and oldstyle figures. Letter combinations such as Th and ff were replaced by the appropriate ligature. Letters fit together consistently without blocks of whitespace. Numbers have the same x-height as lowercase letters, with ascenders and descenders as appropriate. All of these enhanced readability and set the text apart from what any novice could produce in Microsoft Word – and they were easy to accomplish in InDesign.
• Keep blocks from splitting across lines or across pages. Paragraphs start and end on the same page where possible. Similarly, compound proper nouns were not broken across two lines. Rather than fixing this by hand, InDesign allowed me to apply these properties directly to blocks of text.

One of the hallmarks of good print layout is that the design is transparent — that the content is primary and isn’t overshadowed by typographic or design choices. After several hours of going through the list above and putting everything in its right place, I felt confident that the cast and crew appeared to the reader as the most important part of the program, not the designer or the way the text fit the page.

Tonight I’ll be printing 400 copies of the program — and this weekend I’ll find out whether my design was a success. Wish me luck!