​Learn how to improve beauty & readability at the same time 
 
We read so much that it’s scary. You’re reading this sentence. How much else have you read today? How much more will you read? 
 
It can be tiring. Specifically, it can be more fatiguing than it needs to be. It can also be a heck of a lot uglier than it needs to be.
 
We’re talking about letterspacing. 
 
Here’s a great quote: “The space between the letters should be determined by the space within the letters themselves.” 
 
It bears repeating. “The space between the letters should be determined by the space within the letters themselves.”
 
Chew on that one for a second. We’ll circle back to it shortly. 
 
Pick a font, any font? 
 
Let’s start with some real basics here. Serif vs. sans-serif fonts. The serif, as you know, is that little flourish on the end of a stroke, like the little fingers that hang down from the top ends of a letter “T.” Tradition says that serif fonts are the best choice for body copy; the serifs themselves help to set the baseline and subtly align the text, helping the reader along. 
 
“Helping the reader along.” Another good quote. 
 
Sans-serif fonts, on the other hand, are traditionally employed for headlines, for bold applications. The all-time iconic sans-serif font is Helvetica. It’s ubiquitous to the point that it gets bashed and abused, but it’s iconic for a reason. Its elegance lies in its understated beauty. 
 
So. Serif for body copy. Sans-serif for headlines. Simple as that, right? 
 
Of course not. You know that here at Copel Communications, we’re avid fans of justified rule-breaking. There are times when you want to play against expectations, when you want to surprise your audience. Swapping out a serif font for a san-serif one, or vice versa, is the simplest example there is. 
 
Which gets us back to letterspacing. 
 
What’s missing from fonts
 
Back in the day, each letter in the font had its own letterspacing built in. We’re not talking TrueType or OpenType. We’re talking metal. The word “font” shares the same root, in French, as “foundry,” which is where metal was melted down to cast actual fonts. (We know more about this than most people. Be sure to check out our killer blog, “We Bought Fonts at a Foundry.”) So each letter would have a certain amount of metal around it, to “automatically” provide the proper spacing vis-a-vis the ones beside it. 
 
Overall it worked well. But not perfectly. Look at any old book that was printed via letterpress. (If you’re not sure, simply feel the pages. The hard type makes a physical impression in the paper, in contrast to lithography, wherein the printing plates are smooth.) Now, look closely at the type itself. 
 
It will look, well, old. Something about it will appear amiss. 
 
And it’s the flawed letterspacing. The carved-in-metal dictates of the individual letters can’t possibly anticipate, let alone compensate for, the juxtaposition of letter pairs that require special spacing. We’re talking “V-A”, for example. The word “AVAIL,” in caps like that, generally looks horrible when it’s set in metal type. There’s all that dead space in the diagonal channels between the “V” and its pair of flanking “A’s.” It hurts your eyes, and your brain, to read it. 
 
Of course, we’re not setting type like that anymore. It’s all done via computer. And modern computer fonts do have algorithms baked into them to compensate for these special situations. Overall, they work quite well. They can scoot a “V” closer to an “A” without any need for, oh, shaving down a piece of metal!
 
But computers and algorithms can only do so much. The rest is up to you. 
 
Get kerning
 
That quote we’d cited above—“The space between the letters should be determined by the space within the letters themselves”—is from a great art teacher we’d had back in junior high school. Some wisdom just sticks. 
 
He was absolutely right. It’s not just “V-A.” It’s all the letters. A good font is an incredible creation: the way it appears aligned and uniform, when it’s actually an orchestration of careful cheats and eye-trickers, from the capital “O” that may descend beyond the baseline to the “fi” ligature which elides what would’ve been a distracting double-dollop between the serif on the “f” and the dot atop the “i.” 
 
The thing is, the beauty is in there. It’s up to you to liberate it, not constrain it, not shackle it. 
 
Our junior high teacher’s quote is as close as we can get to a “rule” here. This is art, not science. You need to play, to look at it, to experiment. Save your different versions and compare them. Sometimes you’ll want to break the rules: You’ll want to crash those letters together. Or you’ll want to stretch them out, airily, in order to underscore the message. Ditto for leading (pronounced “ledding”): the vertical spacing between individual lines. Use our art teacher’s guidance. Or creatively avoid it. 
 
Here’s the irony in all this. Done right, the best possible creation is practically invisible to the audience. It just... reads. It looks beautiful. It transmits its message. 
 
And that’s what type is supposed to do. 
 
Having trouble with that creative challenge? Contact us. We help clients of all stripes with these kinds of issues, and more, every day.  

“Own your backyard.” That was a phrase we’d heard back in our ad agency days. It meant that you need to dominate your immediate geographical market... especially before you spend a single dollar trying to make inroads elsewhere. 
 
Makes sense, right? 
 
To a point. Back then, “geographical” was a very real factor in the equation. To put it in perspective, this is when terrestrial radio was called, well, “radio.” An FM signal can reach for about 50 miles. A local paper reaches a local market. 
 
There’s nothing wrong with these media. They still exist; some still thrive. And they’re quite relevant for local businesses, such as retailers, restaurants, and car dealers. 
 
But we mentioned “consulting” in the title of this article. And as we write this, we’re still locked down amid Covid and travel restrictions and all that. Crisis? Perhaps. Opportunity? Absolutely. 
 
Clearly, this article will have a big “internet” component to it, but that’s only one aspect of “cross-pollination.” 
 
Make more money
 
Cross-pollination in consulting—a phrase which we made up, by the way—is a more relevant take on “own your backyard.” But it’s also a clever way to expand your backyard. 
 
Put it this way. Which is easier: Cold-call prospecting, or scooping up a referral that’s been tossed your way by a happy client? Exactly. It takes the absolute most effort to reach, and convert, total strangers. At the other end of the spectrum, the ostensibly easiest conversion is upselling an existing client: the so-called “land and expand” strategy. 
 
Cross-pollination is more closely related to the latter than the former. And it’s got a neat spin to it, which we’ll get to in a minute. 
 
Let’s say you’re an expert in Industry A. You know all about it, you specialize in it, it’s the core of your business. That’s great. 
 
Next on your list is Industry B. You also play there, but not as strongly as you do in Industry A. That’s fine. It’s also pretty much the rule among boutique consultancies. So let’s see how we can apply cross-pollination to this situation. 
 
In Industry A—where you’re an expert—you have tons of deep-dive lessons learned. They’re so specific to Industry A, however, that they can’t be applied to any other industry, such as, say, Industry B. 
 
But that’s a misperception. There are always lessons and insights from Industry A that not only apply to Industry B, but are also a welcome surprise to everyone in Industry B, because they lack that specific Industry A insight that only you possess.
 
Voilà. You use your Industry A insights to “cross-pollinate” Industry B. The trick here is to disregard all of those biases that have become ingrained in your thinking that had led you to conclude, incorrectly, that there’s no overlap between Industries A and B. Indeed, the more disparate they appear, the more valuable the cross-pollination insights. If you specialize in, say, long-haul logistics, you’re not going to break much new ground applying that to short-haul logistics. 
 
But if you can apply, say, insights from long-haul logistics to... banking. Whoa. You’re onto something. Entire careers are made from breakthroughs like this. 
 
Do the work, reap the rewards
 
We’re not saying that this is easy. Because if it were, as they say, everyone would have done it. But you’re smart. You’re a hard worker. You simply need to carve out the time and the effort to draw up a little “Column A/Column B” note sheet, and start to populate it. 
 
Here’s where it gets fun. Once you’re able to impress even a single client (or prospect) in Industry B, you’ve just given yourself the opportunity to “land and expand” there. So you can keep working, and learning, and getting paid to do so, building your Industry B expertise to the point where it’s at least as strong as it is for Industry A. (Meaning that Industry C is just around the corner!)
 
Here’s the neat little “spin” we’d hinted at above. You can also use your Industry A insights to prospect in Industry B. That’s right: You can showcase this knowledge as “broader perspective” outside-the-box/outside-the-silo thinking. 
 
Mind you, you need to couch it properly. You can’t tell a banking prospect, “I’ve spent years specializing in long-haul logistics. Let me help your bank.” Clearly, that won’t work. But what if you said something like, “Did you know that the way trucks are ‘reverse-loaded’ at the depot prior to their routes has direct parallels to solving cash-processing across your retail branch network?” Now, we just made that up, but even before we revealed that, you were impressed. Admit it. 
 
Get help
 
We know about these challenges because we work with them, daily, on two different fronts. One: Our consulting clients span a variety of verticals, so we’re always seeing challenges in Industry A, Industry B, Industry C, Industry D... you get the idea. And two: Our clients themselves all straddle more than one industry among their clients and prospects, and we help them apply the insights from one to the other... and also sprinkle in a generous serving of insights from our other industries that they don’t serve. The cross-pollination goes all around. 
 
We can help you, too. On both of those fronts. Simply contact us today to learn more.