Most designers now work almost entirely on screens, and then a project needs a printed piece. The type decisions that were safe stop being safe, for reasons that have nothing to do with taste.
Ink spreads. Pixels do not.
On paper, ink bleeds very slightly into the fibres. Fine strokes get a little heavier, counters get a little smaller, and the tighter the space between strokes the more it closes. On uncoated stock the effect is pronounced; on newsprint it is dramatic.
The practical consequence is that a face which looks delicate and precise on a monitor can come back from the printer looking heavier and muddier than you designed. Faces with very high contrast and small counters are the ones this catches.
Resolution reverses the size constraint
A screen gives a letter maybe 15 pixels of height at body size. Print gives it hundreds of dots. Everything that makes a face unusable at interface sizes — fine serifs, high contrast, delicate detail — works perfectly in print, which is why the traditional book faces are traditional book faces.
So a serif you rejected for a website may be exactly right on paper. EB Garamond and Libre Baskerville are drawn from designs cut for metal and behave accordingly.
Screen-first faces in print
The reverse also holds and is less discussed. A face drawn for screens — sturdy serifs, large lowercase, generous spacing — can look slightly heavy-handed on paper, the way a road sign does close up. Merriweather is superb on a phone and noticeably robust in a book.
| Family | Variable download | Static download |
|---|---|---|
| EB Garamond | 790 KB2 files | 2.2 MB10 files |
| Libre Baskerville | 166 KB2 files | 464 KB8 files |
| Merriweather | 6.2 MB2 files | None published |
| Lora | 224 KB2 files | 555 KB8 files |
The four practical rules
- Set body text smaller than you would on screen. Print body text is typically 9 to 11 point; the same measurement on a monitor would be unreadable.
- Give it more line spacing than the software’s default, and set the measure narrower — 60 to 70 characters is comfortable on paper too.
- Proof at actual size on the actual stock before signing anything off. A laser proof on office paper does not tell you what uncoated will do.
- Check the licence covers what the printer will do with the file. An open licence does; a desktop licence bought for one seat may not cover the printer’s.
One thing that is genuinely the same
Hierarchy. The relationships between heading, subheading and body do not change between media, and if the hierarchy works on screen it will work on paper. It is only the physical constraints that move.