Design for television

Eighteen points as a minimum type size, if you’re coming from a web background, equates to about 18 pixels. On some interactive television projects I’ve pushed it down to 16, but cautiously, because the production path to air usually punishes small type: DV tape, old composite links, online-edits with high compression. Leave type as large as the design will bear.

Notes written in response to David Earls at Typographer.org, who had covered the basics of designing for television and prompted me to add a few things specific to interactive television, which I’d been working on at the time.

In some cases (white text on a red background, for instance) a very subtle black drop-shadow will stop colour bleed and crawling effects. Even if you dislike drop-shadows, a subtle one will look flat and lovely on a broadcast monitor.

Safe areas need to be taken with a pinch of salt. The default safe areas in most editing and compositing software date from before the widespread use of widescreen sets. Try extending the safe area for non-essential text in interactive projects, and consult broadcaster guidelines for their widescreen policies: many channels now broadcast in 14:9 to terrestrial boxes, with options for satellite and cable viewers.

The hardest case is widescreen viewers cropping the top and bottom of the image by setting their TV to crop 4:3 to 16:9, combined with cable or satellite companies cropping the left and right of the image to present 16:9 to 4:3 for non-widescreen viewers. What’s left is a tiny safe rectangle in the centre of the image.

Robert Bradbrook, who made Home Road Movies, has excellent technical notes on designing graphics for 16:9 television and film, including a sample safe area. The BBC’s picture standards documents are also good.

One thing I don’t understand, though, is the BBC’s note that “additional pixels are not taken into account when calculating the aspect ratio, but without them images transferred between systems will not be the correct shape.” Can anyone confirm this is the case for PAL images?