Introduction to typography

What is typography? Typography: The study of all elements of type including the shape, size and spacing of the characters Typography plays an important role in the audience perception of your document or project and its information Typography helps to create “information relationships” in two ways: By the organization of your information Keeping things interesting through the use of fonts, letters and symbols

Principles of Design for typography Legibility: Making sure the audience can read and understand your text Reverse type: white type on a dark background and is designed to make type stand out Similarity, alignment: Using typography to create relationships between similar kinds of information Uniformity or consistency: Repeating familiar elements to focus your audience’s attention Contrast: Creating interest and distinguishing different types of information with different typefaces Hierarchy: Making sure your audience understands that information has different levels of importance

fonts Font: Originally included typeface, style and size, but the term is now interchangeable with typeface Font Family: A typeface and all its variants such as Times New Roman regular, italic and bold Roman: describes a font without additional attributes such as italics Decorative fonts: are those used for display purposes Script fonts: designed to imitate handwriting Blackletter fonts: Imitate an antique European font Monospace fonts: Fonts that mimic the spacing produced by a typewriter

typefaces Typeface: The design for the letters, numbers and symbols that make up a font Serif: a typeface with extensions at the ends of the main strokes that define each letter. These extensions are called serifs. Bracketed serif: a curved serif that fills in the area between the serif and the stroke Sans serif: a typeface without serifs Oldstyle fonts: have bracketed serifs, angled stress, and strokes that move gently from thick to thin Transitional fonts: have bracketed serifs, vertical stress and uneven strokes that move quickly from thick to thin Modern fonts: have unbracketed serifs, vertical stress and uneven strokes Slab Serif Fonts: have heavy serifs, vertical stress and even strokes

Examples Serif Font Sans Serif Font

Spacing choices Proportional fonts: are spaced according to the size of the letter Monospace fonts: are spaced the same for every letter Tracking: the spacing between letters in a word Kerning pairs: sets of letters designed to be spaced closely together Kerning: spacing of letters generally to make them move closer together Ligatures: Letters that have historically been attached, creating a single character Leading: The spacing between lines of a paragraph Em space: a space the width of a capital letter “M” in the font and point size being used En space: half the size of an em space, is the width of a capital letter “N” in the font and point size being used

Spacing conventions Hanging indents: a paragraph’s first line is flush left but the remaining lines are indented Tabs: places on a ruler used to line up text Widows: Single sentences or phrases at the bottom of a column or page. The rest of the paragraph appears on the next page or column Orphans: Single lines of text that appear at the top of the column or page, with the rest of the paragraph appearing in the previous column or page

Alignment There are four primary types: Left Aligned: Often referred to as “left justified” or “flush left”, typically the default setting for a document, begins each line along the left margin of the document Right Aligned: Often referred to as “right justified” or “flush right”, it aligns the beginning of each line of text along the right margin of the document Centered: Text is placed in the center of each line leaving the same margin on both sides Justified: Each line of text fills the entire space from left to right, except for the paragraph indent and the last line of the paragraph