Allow me a bit of a rant. Until a few volumes ago, Social Forces typeset its articles in Minion Pro, a modern serif face well-suited to lengthy stretches of text. Then, for no apparent reason, the journal was redesigned. (I speak loosely.) Minion was retained for the title, abstract and acknowledgment note, but the body text is now set in a light version of Zurich or Univers. OrgHeads will recognize the latter as the font that Administrative Science Quarterly is set in. Presumably ASQ uses it for historical reasons associated with modernist enthusiasm, in the early days of administrative science, for fully logical formalization and functional specification of both one’s organizational charts and the typeface they were presented in.

While Univers is highly readable in applications as diverse as corporate earnings reports, the Deutsche Bank logo, and entries in art catalogs, using it as the typeface for scholarly articles is a bit trickier. To be honest, I don’t like it much, because in its standard incarnations it doesn’t make use of ligatures and its relatively wide interletter spacing makes it hard to read for long stretches. ASQ’s designers at least tried to mitigate these problems somewhat by using a very wide left margin and setting the text ragged-right. Consequently the line-length is shorter and its rhythm varies a little, which makes it easier to read the text for longer stretches—though not, I have to say, all that much easier.

The layout of Social Forces, on the other hand, is a disaster. The redesign simply replaced the main typeface, with no consideration for how differently it would read from a font like Minion. The margins are narrow, the text is set fully justified and the line length is much too long. When combined with the light weight, the lack of ligatures, and the wide, unadjusted inter-letter spacing, the result is a monotonous, ugly, and unclear text block that actively discourages you from sitting down and reading an article.

I’m sorry to go on about this, but I just had to read three longish SF articles in a row and now my eyes are bleeding.