Typesetting Mistakes From the Inauguration Invitation – Lessons for Every Designer

There was a lot of talk about the 2017 presidential inauguration, specifically about the number of people there. Personally, I think this is just a diversion about something that I find way more newsworthy and that is of course the poor typesetting of the invitation and program itself.

https://www.inaugural.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Entire%20Program.pdf

I’ve included a link to the PDF, but I will be calling out different problems.

Now where to start? So at first glance the first page seems to be fine, but looking closer, the spacing is wrong. Yes there are some nice swash italics for the capitals but the text should have been manually kerned. Yes there is even a shortcut in InDesign to do this. Well I suppose I should be grateful that they at least used InDesign to do the program.

This particular problem continues throughout the program. On page 6, however, things start to deteriorate. Although the designer used true small caps, at the bottom half of the page, the lack of typographic knowledge really shines. There are at least four typographic details I would reconsider. I honestly believe that it was at this point, that many people were simply put off from coming.

The designer actually started off well: the dropped capital is tasteful. I would reconsider the raised “th” in 58th. If an ordinal ending is raised, use purpose-designed superior letters where the font provides them rather than simply shrinking the ordinary letters. For dates such as the 1790s in running text, my preference is old-style figures; lining figures may suit capitals.

Now, ligatures are a basic feature of suitable OpenType fonts, but the result depends on the font and settings. I would check the combinations shown here. I would also review the wide word spacing in the second and third lines. Hyphenation and careful justification settings can help; optical margin alignment is a separate refinement to the visual edges of the text. None of these controls guarantees a good result without inspection.

I’m fairly sure, after the poorly set first pages, that nobody even went past page 6! But on page 8, the map title raises another question: dash style. Chicago normally uses em dashes without surrounding spaces. I prefer spaced en dashes, which Chicago recognises as common British practice. The spaced em dashes here follow neither of those conventions.

Of course, page 11 also has distracting rivers in the text. These warrant a closer look at the justification and hyphenation settings; the printed result alone does not tell us exactly which settings were used. A couple of pages earlier, on page 9, ligatures make an appearance.

But it’s not just the program. It seems that this sad state of affairs is something that is endemic in Washington as a whole as can be seen by this photo of Sean Spicer.

It seems that the new President hasn’t yet got his house in order and had to send Mr Spicer to talk about the crowds again. Although the press is speculating about why President Trump is spending so much time on this issue, it’s very clear from this photo what Trump is trying to hide. Clearly his surprise victory didn’t give him time to prepare properly but honestly, it’s there in clear sight. The kerning in the word WASHINGTON, especially between the WA, is too tight.

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