|
Server : Apache/2.4.62 System : FreeBSD fbsdweb2.web.rcn.net 14.1-RELEASE FreeBSD 14.1-RELEASE releng/14.1-n267679-10e31f0946d8 GENERIC amd64 User : www ( 80) PHP Version : 8.3.8 Disable Function : NONE Directory : /domains/nostrada/ |
Upload File : |
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content="en-us">
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=windows-1252">
<meta name="GENERATOR" content="Microsoft FrontPage 4.0">
<meta name="ProgId" content="FrontPage.Editor.Document">
<title>Siddur Design</title>
<meta name="Microsoft Theme" content="none">
<style>
<!--
.snerd { font-family: Veljovic Black; color: #CC0000 }
body { font-family: Veljovic Medium }
p { font-size: 14pt }
li { font-size: 14pt }
h1 { color: #CC0000; font-family: Veljovic Black }
h2 { color: #CC0000; font-family: Veljovic Black }
h3 { color: #CC0000 }
hr { border-top-style: dashed }
-->
</style>
</head>
<body bgcolor="#CCCCCC">
<div align="center">
<center>
<table border="1" cellpadding="30" cellspacing="0" width="80%" bgcolor="#FFFFFF" bordercolor="#CC0000">
<tr>
<td>
<h1>Siddur Design</h1>
<p> </p>
<p>[design of Jewish prayer books]</p>
<p>simple equation a x b = c</p>
<p>where a is the content</p>
<p>b is the type size</p>
<p>and c is the weight of the book</p>
<hr align="center">
<h2>Content</h2>
<ol>
<li>At its simplest, the content might consist of, say, the weekday
t'fillot. </li>
<li>But the editor or publisher might choose to add other things such as the
insertions for the Yamim nora-im, the text of the weekday Torah readings,
Torah blessings, Mi shebeirachs, Pirkei avot, Tehillim, meditations,
kavanot, alternative t'fillot, and supplements for a House of mourning. Such
expansion of the core t'fillot goes back to some of the earliest printed
siddurim. Millgram says, "Each [publisher] tried to enhance the
usefulness of his publication in order to attract customers. If one included
in his siddur the mishnaic tractate Avot . . ., his competitor included the
Book of Psalms." (p. 543)</li>
<li>Translation and transliteration.</li>
<li>Titles and instructions. Three levels of titles or rubrics might be
typical: the service ("Shacharit l'chol"), the section ("T'fillah"),
and the unit ("K'dusha"). The instructions might be no
more than an indication of which passages are inserted on special days. Or,
like the <i>Artscroll,</i> the instructions can be detailed and incorporate
the halachic views and minhag of the publisher. In any event, the trend in
Reform is towards fewer instructions; the trend in Orthodoxy is towards
more.</li>
<li>Commentary. Artscroll still has the only full-blown commentary in a siddur
you can daven from.</li>
<li>Beyond the text, there might be the apparatus: table of Psalms, source
citations or cross references, commentary.</li>
<li>The usual front matter, permissions, etc.</li>
</ol>
<h2 class="snerd">Type
size</h2>
<p>Type size, white space, margins and decoration all contribute to a book's
size, weight and cost. But the size of the type is the most important, and
therefore the name of this section.</p>
<ol>
<li>Adequate type size and leading are the <i>sine qua non</i> of a usable
siddur. Yet a one-point increase in type size can result in a 21% increase
in the space needed for a book's text -- in a siddur shaleim, that could add
more than 100 pages. Ouch! </li>
<li><i>"Aesthetics? We ain't got no stinking aesthetics!" </i>Beautifully
illuminated siddurim date back at least as far as the Worms Machzor of
1272, but the knack seems to have been lost. The lack of illustration,
paucity of decoration and unimaginative typography of so many recent
siddurim makes me think that they were published by a band of stern
Calvinists.</li>
</ol>
<p> </p>
<p>Designer issues</p>
<h2 class="snerd">The Balancing Act</h2>
<p><i>Weight is bad and cost is worse.</i></p>
<p>Content and usability are in a dynamic balance with the limitations of weight
and cost, a relationship that can be expressed by the equation given at the
beginning of this page. Much of the siddur designer's job is to mediate that
delicate balance.</p>
<p>Siddurim meant for davening rather than study generally weigh in at 2 lbs
or less. The only exceptions I know of are Kol haneshamah (Reconstructionist,
2-1/4 lbs.) and Siddur tehillat hashem (Lubavitcher, 2 lbs. 9 oz.).</p>
<p><b>Innovation</b>. If the designer has </p>
<h2>Designer's Toolkit</h2>
<p>Type </p>
<p> responsive readings </p>
<p>Usability</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Other</h2>
<p>aesthetics, typography, usability, layout</p>
<ol>
<li>You can further help your users by adding nekudot to headings. You can use
special characters to indicate the kameitz katan and sh'va na. In
transliterated passages, you can add an accent to stressed syllables.</li>
<li><i>Siddur Lev Yisrael</i> has symbols that show when and how to bow.</li>
<li><i>Bond of Life, Siddur Sim Shalom </i> and <i>Artscroll </i>mark where the
Ba-al
t'filah resumes chanting at the end of a passage.</li>
<li>In <i>Moreh Derekh</i>, we differentiated between the longer explanations
that needn't be read every time ("At this point, the rabbi may call
upon . . . ) and the direct instructions ("The congregation
sings:").</li>
<li>Our colleague Warren Wolfsohn likes to set the instructions to sit and
stand in big, bold type, reasoning that it will add to the comfort of
newcomers.</li>
<li>[note the special marks in <i>Siddur rinat yisrael </i>and <i>Ha-avodah
shebalev</i>]</li>
</ol>
<p>flipping: contrast our wedding birkon.</p>
<p><b>Typography </b></p>
<ul>
<li>One of the finest examples of typography and
layout in the English language is the famous Oxford Lectern Bible designed by
Bruce Rogers in 1935. A couple sample pages can be seen in Rogers' <i>Paragraphs
on Printing.</i></li>
<li>The most attractive siddur I've seen is <i>The Traditional Prayer Book</i> edited by
David de Sola Pool (I'm referring to the edition covered in blue cloth and
10-1/2" tall). Elegant typography, beautifully arranged on a
page with generous margins; outstanding chapter openings; monumental Hebrew
type stamped in two colors of foil on a rich blue cloth cover. Weighs in at a mighty 4-1/4 lbs.</li>
<li>Two Israeli all-Hebrew siddurim that were typeset with great care are
Shlomo Tal's <i>Siddur rinat yisrael </i>(I believe it was the first siddur
to use a special mark for the kameitz katan) and <i>Ha-avodah shebalev.</i></li>
<li>Since their 1981 publication of the <i>Friday Eve Service, </i>I've been
impressed with the Artscroll prayerbooks. No one can cram more stuff onto a
page and still make it look good than designer Sheah Brander.</li>
<li>[mention Schott's miscellany]</li>
</ul>
<p>[font: there's an early heb font in Thee Classics of Italian Calligraphy --
Tagliente 94]</p>
<hr align="center">
<p>Warren Wolfsohn says that siddur design must begin with a worship philosophy.
While I may disagree, surely the designer must understand the editor's worship
philosophy before beginning.</p>
<hr>
<hr>
<p>11-22-2008</p>
<h2>A balancing act</h2>
<p>You can look at the process of designing a siddur as a delicate
balance. </p>
<p>On the one hand, you'd like your type size to be large, your leading, white
space and margins generous. Where possible, you'd like paragraphs to not break
across pages. It would be nice if songs could have line breaks that match the
way they are sung, and poems could be broken so as to reveal their structure.
Your users would appreciate not having to jump around the book unnecessarily.
And, finally, you want a paper that has low show-through.</p>
<p>On the other hand, as you try to achieve these goals, you'll drive up
the thickness of your siddur, the size of its pages, and the weight of the
volume. And drives up the cost of printing and shipping. </p>
<div align="left">
<table border="0" cellpadding="10" cellspacing="0">
<tr>
<td><b>Good things</b></td>
<td><b>Bad things</b></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td valign="top">type size<br>
leading<br>
white space and margins<br>
unbroken paragraphs<br>
poetic line breaks<br>
service continuity<br>
paper opacity</td>
<td valign="top">thickness of book<br>
page size<br>
weight<br>
cost</td>
</tr>
</table>
</div>
<p>In other words, doing the things in the left column, things which would make
your siddur more user-friendly, inevitably increases the things in the right
column, which reduce user-friendliness.</p>
<p>This, then, is the tightrope that the siddur designer must navigate.</p>
<h3>Type size</h3>
<p>When I started spec'ing type in the early 1970s, I generally used 10 pts. for
body text. It looked pretty readable to me and my clients didn't complain. I'm a
lot older now and 11 or 12 pts. now looks good to me. By comparison, look at the
back of a CD these days and you'll see that the tiny nearly-illegible type is
meant for a customer with younger eyes than mine.</p>
<p>One of the difficulties in siddur design is matching the size of the Hebrew
font to that of the English font. English translations are more wordy than the
Hebrew originals, so you may need to adapt your layout or increase the size of
the Hebrew to compensate. Also, the stroke weight of Hebrew letters is greater
than that of most English book faces, giving blocks of Hebrew text a darker
color than blocks of English <u>(at least in most cases)</u>. Interestingly, biblical scholar Hugh J. Schonfield
attempted to create a Hebrew font that would more nearly match the stroke
weights of an English font. He wasn't successful.</p>
<p>Furthermore, if English and Hebrew are both found in the same sentence, the
difficulties are exacerbated. If you match the height of an aleph to the x-height
(lower case height) of your English font, you'll have room for the
ascender of the lamed and the descender of the kof. But it may look unbalanced,
because typical English text has many more ascenders than Hebrew. One solution
is to increase the size of the Hebrew so that the aleph is almost as tall as the
cap height of the English. The balance will be better, but you'll need to
increase the leading to accommodate the ascenders and descenders of the Hebrew.</p>
<p>For an excellent discussion of the problems of combining Hebrew and English
type, see <i>Design Considerations Affecting the Simultaneous Use of Latin and
Hebrew Typography </i>by Simon Prais. You can request a copy at <a href="http://www.hebrewtypography.me.uk/">Simon's
website</a>.</p>
<h3>Typefaces</h3>
<p>[move to aesthetics section]</p>
<p>For English, I lean to 20th century oldstyle fonts with large x-heights like Minion (1990, Roger
Slimbach), Trump Mediaeval (1954, Georg Trump), and New Aster (1958, Francesco
Simoncini).</p>
<p>Also discuss Meridien, Apollo, Slimbach, ITC Garamond, Adobe Garamond (hiostorical
revival), Spectrum (an Aldine oldstyle)</p>
<p> </p>
<p>apparatus</p>
<p>paper bulk and color</p>
<p> </p>
<p>[measure]</p>
<p>Typographic ornaments</p>
<p>send to ELS, Hara person, debbie smilow, warren, simon prais, tony
zak, amy helfman, larry yudelson, jan kaufman, perry rank, chuck simon,
ari davidow, joel hoffman
<p>
<p>Artscroll typography -- Artscroll fonts: Friz. Palatino -- mostly in
italic; the lower-case "y" in the ital is much tighter than
the Adobe version. The right stroke of the Artscroll "Optima"
extends at the top. Perhaps they derive from the Varityper or
Compugraphic fonts of the
<p>Haddasah</td>
</tr>
</table>
</center>
</div>
</body>
</html>