12/27/2023 0 Comments Toronto white pages![]() ![]() A box with a face, legs and arms lies in a bubble bathtub staring at a phone. Try reading one of those pages, with 18.5 centimetres of small Helvetica type spread over onionskin pages, ugly boxes and rules surrounding the section headings, and absurdly ill-drawn and ill-conceived little icons intended to exemplify Bell’s overpriced calling features. But the introductory sections, which give area codes and promote overpriced services like call waiting, are a catechism of how not to use desktop publishing. True, Bell’s decision to split residential and business listings into different sections works well and makes sense. Those faults would be more readily tolerated if the rest of the book weren’t such a disaster. (Some Dutch phone books used that design for years. Ever get lost following the ellipses to the actual number? Ever phoned the wrong Brian Jones by mistake? A better way – phone numbers to the left of the listing, with no intervening ellipses. That’s how phone books have been designed for as long as I’ve been alive, and it’s not the best way. It’s surname first, then given name or initial, then street address, then an ellipsis (.), then the number. Bell provided no explanation for its wonky alphabetizing and all-caps rule.Īnother shibboleth of phone-book design is the exact layout of a listing. How about a van Dijk or a ffolliott, whose surnames begin with a mandatory lowercase letter? Uh-uh-uh. Looking for an Angus Macdonald but not an Angus MacDonald? You can’t tell them apart. Obviously all the Joneses should come first in one uninterrupted sequence, followed by the Jones-Aardvarks, the Jones-Josephsons, and the Jones-Zwickys. In other words, Bell defeats the purpose of surname suppression by mixing in every variant of a surname in strict, mindless alphabetical order. Then the Joneses start up again with Jones, Barbara keep looking and you eventually hit Jones, Brian. The next listing you see, unaccountably, is Jones-Ball, N. You follow all the As and Bs down the Jones column until you hit Jones, B.W. It’s much more sensible, but good sense is not what prompted Bell to use “surname suppression”: Without it, a Bell PR person told me, the Toronto White Pages might have ballooned into a two-volume doorstop.īut surname suppression is another example of Bell’s uncanny ability to blow a good idea. Instead, the first instance of a surname is shown (in capitals), with all the given names associated with that surname in an indented list below (in upper- and lowercase). At any rate, the 1995 Toronto White Pages incorporate a New York-style change: Surnames are not repeated endlessly down columns. I would have to funnel my questions through a PR apparatchik who knows nothing about typography. Once the precept of this story sank in with the Bell crowd, I had to contend with the fact that Bell’s phone-book designers do not talk to the media. Any logo that requires explanation is a failure, and what’s it doing on the cover of the phone book? Bell is, after all, a widely despised monopoly, so why stuff its logo in our faces every time we look up a number? Just as an example, this year’s hoplessly misguided, self-aggrandizing cover features the new New Age-y Bell logo and a wordy bilingual description of what the logo means. Over and over again, as I telephoned through the vast labyrinth that is Bell and its Yellow Pages subsidiary Tele-Direct, whenever I stated that I was researching a story on the graphic design of the White Pages I was invariably asked, “You mean the covers?” Bell minions seemed unable to understand that the inside pages of a phone book have to be designed to them, only the covers matter, and only then as marketing vehicles. ![]() The first obstacle in discussing the graphic design of the White Pages is getting that concept into the heads of Bell nabobs. Indeed, Bell’s new Toronto White Pages offer a lesson in how an ill-conceived set of design “improvements” can make a telephone book illogical and difficult to use. Since nearly everyone uses it – except for the impatient, who spring for directory assistance, and some disabled people – phone books need to be taken more seriously as graphic-design statements. We’ve all heard the joke that runs along the lines of “Ooh! That Denzel Washington! He’s so dreamy I’d pay to watch him read the phone book!” Graphic designers – and their clients – abet that reputation: Only expensive, “important” books are considered worthy of good design.īut in a country where 99% of households have a telephone, the everyday White Pages are the most widely-distributed books in the land. In conventional wisdom, the phone book is a quintessential symbol of boredom. You can try looking up numbers at Canada411. You have not found the searchable telephone directory for the city of Toronto, obviously.
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