Toshi Omagari | Ink traps and pals

Ink traps and pals

03 April, 2021

Recently I’ve seen this tweet from Yves Peters asking how to call these spikes which I replied briefly (spoiler: it’s a light trap!). I had a lot more to explore on the topic, so I decided to write not just about light traps, but similar concepts and shapes too. There are days in life of typeface designers when they want to write 4000 words about these things with no regards to conciseness.

Ink traps

The general idea of ink trap is enhanced edges of inside corners of printed graphics. You might see them in typefaces, as well as logos intended for printing. It is a solution to suboptimal printing conditions in which a larger area of graphics (e.g. line intersections) could result in ink smudge. If you want to minimise the effect, you counteract by shaving off the mass around the problematic part. This technique is the ink trap.

Intended shape, what will happen in bad/small print (notice the thickened centre), and ink trap

In typefaces, the best known example of ink traps is Matthew Carter’s Bell Centennial. It was released in 1978 for phone directories with the intent to typeset directories at much smaller font size than before, thereby reducing the papers needed to print the same content, and ultimately printing cost. It is not simply a matter of choosing smaller font size though, since the phone books were very cheaply printed on very cheap paper, and letters would easily be smudged to the point of illegibility if you didn’t counteract. Carter’s solution was to cut the inside corner deep. The typeface looks super odd compared to the original Bell Gothic but works like a charm when printed at very small sizes like 4 to 6 points. It is intentionally imperfect at the outline stage, and counts on the bad ink to do the final touch instead of complaining about it. It’s a masterpiece that teaches you the attitude of a pragmatic designer.

You can learn more on Bell Centennial in Nick Sherman’s article.

Bell Centennial Name & Number

Bell Centennial in use in a phone book. Image courtesy of Nick Sherman.

Another example is United Nations emblem. Its problem is the complexity of the world map is being used like a regular logo, and it’s not going to look good at small sizes. I would imagine earlier computers might not have been able to process the small islands and make lots of designers cry. Except that is probably not what happened by large, because the alternate, simplified version was made. Maxim Zhukov, who is known among typeface designers as the OG ambassador of Cyrillic type design, designed the small version of the UN logo in 1991. It reduces the number of islands, removes altitude/longitude lines where things would be crowded (notably the Timor Sea in the north of Australia and Gulf of Mexico), and of course ink traps. People with less understanding of design might criticise the lack of accuracy, but it was never intended to be used at a size where you could count individual islands.

UN logo taken from Wikipedia.

Maxim Zhukov’s version. It’s probably someone else’s crude tracing, but preserves the original intention well enough. Given that the UN logo is used in white on blue too, wouldn't that technically necessitate reverse ink trap version as well?

The two versions of the logo in tandem: full version is on the flag, and the small version is on the wall.

Small version being used at a large size. Brits and Italians might complain that their lands are missing.

In fact, there are infinite variations of the same logo depending on the scale and production method. Even the one on Wikipedia appears to be a manual recreation. The map is only to be taken as an idea, rather than the literal representation.

This UN emblem badge features understandably a super-simplified map. It’s not an official item but even an official one wouldn't be that much different.

Ink traps in various forms

I said in the second paragraph that the technique is the ink trap, not the shape. That’s because there are numerous shapes with the same intent, and numerous intent with the same shape. And I prefer to categorise them by intent. That’s what this blog post is about. As long as the goal is to reduce the ink smudge or count on ink to fill out the intentional blank, I think they all can be ink trap regardless of form.

Ecofont, made in 2009 by the Dutch design firm Spranq, is a Vera Sans with holes in the middle with the aim to reduce ink. The text may look slightly lighter or you might notice the holes when used at large sizes, but it apparently reduces the ink needed to print the same text set in Vera (hey, maybe the circle size could be a variable font idea). It claims to save ink and your wallet, except it’s not free; I am not sure how many prints you need in order to justify its annual subscription price of €7 in order to make a difference, but I would imagine quite a bit more than an average person needs to print. By that point it’s...