A curious US culture-war memo about typefaces becomes a sharp lesson in readability, newspaper craft, and how badly those lessons have been forgotten in Australian journalism.

How confusing it was when, readying to ridicule the latest Trump administration absurdity, I saw, just for a moment, something of a grain of truth in it.

It was visceral.

“If you want it readable, set it in Times New Roman, 10 point on 12 leading, black on white, as the maker intended.”

The speaker was the incomparable Bob James (1932-2004), master typographer and newspaper-design guru, addressing us Harry Brittain Fellows on our Commonwealth Press Union tour of the United Kingdom in 1997. James’s obit in The Times declared his “huge influence on the appearance of British newspapers for three decades” and noted that he “changed the face of Australian newspapers too in a series of tours.”

Too right, and for all the right reasons – entirely unlike the ridiculous Marco Rubio memo that cut the Calibri typeface from official communication so as to “abolish yet another wasteful DEIA [Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Accessibility] program”.

The State Department cable reportedly sent to all US diplomatic posts said that typography shapes the professionalism of an official document and Calibri is informal compared with serif typefaces.

“To restore decorum and professionalism to the department’s written work products … the department is returning to Times New Roman as its standard typeface.

“This formatting standard aligns with the President’s One Voice for America’s Foreign Relations direction, underscoring the department’s responsibility to present a united professional voice in all communications.”

James would have pointed out, gently or waspishly as the occasion deserved, that it’s nothing to do with formality and informality (and, apparently, the absence of moral fibre in users of the latter). It’s only ever about readability and legibility.

Sans faces give you legibility. Serifs give you readability.

Think of a page of sports results: the name of the competition should be set left in sans, preferably in bold, the detail of the result following in serif. That way, the reader can scan to find the comp she’s interested in quickly; then have the result more easily digestible because of its different typeface.

Press Gazette’s obit cited an example involving James directly, Mel Vasey, editor of the Wharfedale Observer, recalling Bob going for an eye test, and struggling with the chart: “When he reached the bottom line, he told the optician, ‘I can’t read it, but I can tell you it is in Gill Sans Bold’.”

The Gazette continued: “As anyone taught by Bob will know, Gill was chosen for its legibility rather than its readability.”

We can only imagine the fun James would have had quizzing the Secretary of State about kerning, initial caps, the x-heights of various cuts of type, the difficulties of random ascenders and descenders in headlines, and, of course, the proper deployment of the table of luminosity when doing colour-reverse banners.

But to suggest to James that it all had some moral purpose beyond holding the reader on to each page for longer would have won short shrift.

While Rubio, for all the wrong reasons, happened to brush on the undiminished strength of Times New Roman, it is another American citizen, Rupert Murdoch, who has done a little more to sponsor the preservation of at least some James-like principles in Australian newspapers.

For abundant clarity, I’m not talking about content here.

But it must be obvious to anyone who watches people read newspapers, as anyone who designs them should, that News Ltd’s offerings hold people on a page longer.

The reasons are right there on the newsstand.

Especially in the tabloids, such as The Herald-Sun and The Daily Telegraph, pages are designed around a picture, as James would decree. That’s a well-cropped picture, and given its proper size, too. Fellow Pearls writer David Armstrong, the best editor we had in my quarter-century or so at The Canberra Times (though we had him for only a bit less than a year) used to tell me as news editor when we had a winning picture: think of how big it should be, then add a column.

Having got the pic properly cropped, in the right place and proportion, the lead yarn comes next: headlined big enough to show it’s the lead, but complementing the pic by design (even if of different subject matter and so cut off with a rule). Then you can think how to work in a rattling read as a strip, or a single leg, and have something that ties off the bottom of the page.

The Murdoch tabs still deploy these basic tenets, and they use hanging indent, reverses, deep etching and other old devices to good effect, too.

The result: people consume more of their news, at least in the print editions.

Meanwhile, what used to be the Fairfax stable, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and the Times, have shrunk from broadsheets to tabloids with someone deciding to keep designing 11-column pages on a seven-column grid. Or maybe they didn’t even turn their minds to it.

Epic fail. The result is a kiddies’ scrapbook with repetitive set layouts all screaming the one message: don’t read me.

The great copy those mastheads generate deserves far better treatment.

James, who once spurned a proffered toothpaste because of the way the tube had “misused Optima”, would surely have been appalled by what has happened to typography and newspaper craft in the 21 years since his passing.

I guess we all just have to be thankful that print editions now make up but a small and still declining fraction of newspaper readership.