I've been reading The Economist recently. Overall they have excellent page design and typography. But being the detail-oriented designer that I am, I noticed a problem with their headings.The Economist uses Officina Sans for these headings. Overall it's a great font. However, the lowercase i has a partial serif which causes some problems with several letter pairs. I first noticed it with the ri pair, but it also shows up with ti. You can see it at the right. It doesn't look quite as bad at 72pt, but the problem is exacerbated at body text sizes, where the thin space between the letters becomes muddied.
The crossbar of the first letter runs into the serif of the i, which makes a strange gestalt and draws the eye. I thought about creating a typical ligature where the letters are purposefully joined together, but that didn't look right to me. So I went the other way; I dropped the serif off the i for these ligatures. I think it really improves readability. It even works for other pairs, like rn.
I'd be honored if ITC included this concept on their next OpenType revision of Officina Sans.
As the designer of the Economist’s layout and the fonts used, i have been aware of this issue for a while. Certain character combinations suck. An i with a top serif is useful because it serves to distinguish i from 1, l and I. (Depending what font you read this in, you won't see much of a distinction between these characters, QED). The combination of r with a straight letter without ascender always causes a problem when the r gets too close. The rn often looks like an m, and the rm like double n. And ri can look like an n as well. Generous tracking (space between letters) helps but may look to loose overall.
Nobody has had a problem with legibility of Economist headlines so far, and even the sidebars and tables that use Officina Sans seem to work ok. So this is more an esthetic issue. It bugs me, too. The solution would, indeed, be an alternate r-i combination which could well be incorporated into an Open Type font. The present ITC OT fonts don't have this. And it wouldn't be any use to the Economist because that is not produced with one of the desktop layout apps like Quark or Indesign, but with a proprietary system that needs intensive reprogramming for every change. And i doubt that it supports OT. Half of the reason why the newspaper hasn’t changed the layout first published in May 2001 may be down to this. ;-)
We did design a dedicated version of Officina, called Display, for the cover. That has a straight i and less movement in the letters overall. Regular Officina in its bolder weights was deemed to ”goofy“ by the editors, and rightly so. The headline version could be applied to the smaller headlines inside the newspaper as well, but that would also require major programming. And all that for the few of us that even notice those details...
Erik, thanks for your comment. I overall love the look of Officina, which is why I took the time to try to tweak it an improve it. Like you say, though, the audience that would notice such details is fairly small.
Interesting background on the legacy publishing system The Economist uses. Given what you said, the best solution would be use Officina Display for their sub-headings. Then I could look at the word "America" without cringing a bit. :-)
PS, Meta is one of my top favorite fonts of all time. I love the lowercase g.