BARBARA HODGSON
Barbara Hodgson (Vancouver) had been a book designer for a decade when she approached Chronicle Books in San Francisco with a book proposal of her own. Hodgson’s first book, The Tattooed Map, was published in 1995, and her sixth book with Chronicle, Italy Out of Hand: A Capricious Tour, is out in May. She not only writes and designs them, but she also creates incredibly elaborate typographic illustrations that entice the reader into her reality.

As a designer, Hodgson looks at both legibility and economy: She determines how many words she can fit on a page and still be readable. “A good typeface can be rendered unreadable by a poor layout or wrong size choice. As far as specific typefaces go for text, I’ve become very fond of Bembo and Fournier, and though I often try setting a book in another face, I usually just come back to one of these two.” She describes Bembo as “compact without looking condensed.” She finds its small caps pleasing, and is particularly fond of the “beautiful downstroke” on the uppercase R, even though it can be problematic with the following letter. As for Fournier, she appreciates its relatively small x-height, and she is jazzed by Fournier Italic’s zeds—of which she managed to use a neat pair on page 12 of The Lives of Shadows.

Hodgson acknowledges that older type styles, depending on the association the viewer has with them, can create a strong sense of place or context, but she adds, “I don’t think the designer or artist can rely on that alone. When in doubt, I say, use a classic typeface, rather than one from a specific time period or place, and use other elements to create time and place.” In Hodgson’s Naples collage (see page 61), only two elements predate 1999 and 2000, but the context makes the type appear older than it is. The 1862 is a rubbing of a delivery van license plate.