Brian Lawler knows a thing or two about fine printing. The professor of graphic communication at California State Polytechnic University at San Luis Obispo oversees a quirky museum that houses a collection of 19th-century presses and more than 500 fonts of antique type. His passion for the intricacies of print is such that he'll comment offhandedly about the letter spacing in the Gutenberg Bible (mashed up pretty tight) and wax nostalgic about his "cook's tour" of a place called the Mergenthaler Linotype Co. That's where, back in the 1970s, a group of legendary designers sat around drafting tables in a big workroom, manually drawing -- yes, drawing -- letters. At least one of them went on to win a MacArthur "genius" grant, Lawler reports, with a hint of awe.
But the day we're chatting with him, he relates the tale of another "masterful" piece of typesetting. It's an item that's fairly familiar to the average consumer, especially to anyone who fancies himself tech-savvy or a little cool, or both. The design, Lawler says, is "stunning" (Gutenberg, eat your heart out) yet goes unread by millions of buyers, even though ignoring it can be costly to them in the long run. The document he has in mind? The user agreement that came with his new iPhone.
We've all seen it, or something like it. It's a 32-page pamphlet, which takes a solid 30 minutes to read closely. (We know. We tried.) If just scanning the pages tires our eyes, Lawler says, there's a reason -- and it isn't just the proliferation of legalese like "warranties of merchantability." With margins of only about one-eighth of an inch, the page reads like a big gray mass, he says, with hardly any white space. And according to a transparent ruler he keeps handy to measure lettering size, the characters' height hits only 4.5 points -- about one-sixteenth of an inch. Put another way, that's a smidge taller than the thickness of a dime. "Seriously small," he declares.
By Lawler's reckoning, the spacing between the lines of text isn't doing our eyeballs any favors either, scrunched to about 5.5 points. That's painfully tight, he says, squeaking just past the minimum legible standard before the descenders (the bottoms of the j's and p's, for instance) in one line of text start to overlap with the ascenders (the tops of the h's and f's) in the next line. And if you think any of these line spacings and type sizes came to be by accident, you're mistaken, says Lawler. The world's best typesetters work on these documents, and most fine-print producers review the whole design with legal teams. "There are $500-an-hour lawyers who make those decisions," he says.
For its part, Apple declines to discuss the intricacies of its type; it does say text is now easier to read on the latest iPhone because of a high-resolution "retina display." But to Lawler, the most striking design move is one that might surprise readers: the liberal use of uppercase letters. There are 19 separate blocks of all-cap text -- some five pages' worth -- in the iPhone agreement, including a disclaimer about Google Maps (the gist: They're provided "as is") and 60 lines in a section called "Disclaimer of Warranties" (buried halfway in: Don't count on the iPhone to operate a weapons system).
An uppercase strategy might seem consumer-friendly, a good way to alert users to warnings, but Lawler says it's just the opposite -- it makes the paragraphs nearly impossible to visually penetrate. Indeed, experts in the field say that without the variety of different-shaped letters, readers tend to perceive words of all-cap text as inscrutable blocks. (One study says that it slows reading speed by as much as 20%.) So why would a company present its customers with such a thicket of forbidding type? The lifelong lettering expert sums up his tutorial with a sigh: "They don't want you to read it."
The fine print
Collections of warnings, disclaimers and legal jargon that come with most products and services -- designed in what typesetters descriptively call mice type -- have become daily fixtures for American consumers. In many ways, it's a time-honored national tradition, employed historically in everything from snake-oil elixirs (it contains how much opium?) to stock market manipulation. And while dinky-print disclaimers like "results may vary," "void where prohibited" and "may cause dry mouth or abnormal dreams" have become an annoying fact of life, most Americans have learned to pretty much tune them out and sign that 10-inch stack of loan documents or click "I agree" on the 55-page online user agreement -- hoping all the while they haven't signed away any vital organs.
According to research conducted by professors at John Marshall Law School and DePaul University, 61% of consumers reported that they didn't read all the terms of contracts before agreeing to them. (And those are just the ones who will admit to it.) In a related study, 96% of subjects signed a contract that included clauses saying they'd do push-ups on demand and give fellow participants electric shocks. "Laid edge to edge, they're impossible to stay on top of," says New York attorney James Denlea, of the fine-print disclaimers and contracts in consumers' lives. "It would be a full-time job."
But talk to consumer advocates, or even to the lawyers who write the stuff, and they'll say that the fine-print world is going through a significant transition -- thanks to an ongoing cat-and-mouse game over what consumers need to know. On the average Joe's side, regulators have recently pushed back on the tiny print with new rules designed to curb abuses. At long last, mutual funds have to disclose the fees they charge to 401k account holders. Airlines must now incorporate all previously asterisked fees and surcharges in their advertised ticket prices (no more fuel-tax sticker shock). But critics worry that some of the moves may only backfire -- generating even more pages of disclosure instead of reducing them.
