The Lighter Note

Font of knowledge

AN eagle-eyed reader alerted us to something we’d missed in the world of printing.

Apparently the Yellow Pages has shrunk.

The brains trust at The Note immediately thought that maybe there was less advertising in this iconic publication as customers migrate to the internet.

While that may be the case, the mystery of the shrinking Yellow Pages was at least partially solved by turning to the web.

There we found an announcement by the owner of the Yellow Pages, Sensis, which used a different language to describe the smaller book. It seems the reduced size is all about innovation and evolution, which have worked together to create new “compact-sized” directories in mainland metropolitan markets.

Apparently this downsizing involves a 15 per cent smaller product including a “new” typeface, which presumably is less space intensive than its predecessor.

As an aside, the fresh typeface is Bell Centennial, a font with an oddly telephonic history, hence the Bell part of the name. Apparently US telco AT&T commissioned its creation in the 1970s (hmmm, not so new) to celebrate the company’s 100th anniversary and, coincidentally, replace the existing Bell Gothic font with something that used less paper. Those Americans …way ahead of the curve.

The upside is that Sensis has realised that smaller print has consequences.

It said that magnifying aids can be ordered by ringing a 1800 number.

All this helps explain how an operative of The Note captured this image of piles of unclaimed Yellow Pages in front of an apartment block in West Perth recently.

Perhaps they were too small to be noticed?