Important considerations
- No one likes to read entire blocks of monotone text (no matter how useful the information is).
- Think about your audience & target market (choose type like you choose your words/toner.)
- You want your audience to know you care.
- Knowledge about type gives you the power to create legible, well-organized documents that are easy to read.
The anatomy of a typeface
- Typographers spend a very long time tweaking and fine-tuning font faces. Please respect this by not stretching or distorting the type!
- Every small attribute contributes to the font’s unique character.
Counter:
Eye:
Descender:
Serif:
Crossbar:
Arm:
Bowl:
Tail:
Ascender:
Spine:
Shoulder:
Foot:
Loop:
Ear:
Leg:
Link:
Apex:
Bracket:
Font measurements
- Leading: The vertical space between lines of text.
- Kerning: The space between 2 specific letters/characters.
- Tracking: The overall spacing between letters/characters.
- Baseline shift: Vertical positioning of text.
Justification / alignment
- Centre-aligned.
- Right-aligned.
- Centre-aligned.
- Fully justified.
The most famous font family
Helvetica is the most ubquitous and “neutral” typeface with impeccable proportions.
Many font families are spinoffs of Helvetica, including Arial.
Type etiquette
Don’t:
- Stretch or distort fonts.
- Use Comic Sans (for anything).
- Use too many fonts in your documents (2-3 is usually a good number).
- Use illegible fonts.
Do:
- Consider your audience/target market when choosing a typeface.
- Convert files to PDF before giving it to a printer (it embeds the fonts).
- Choose the “outline text” function in Illustrator for fonts that Adobe Acrobat may not allow you to embed.
Type & design principles
1. Space is the single most important principle in design. It promotes readability, legibility, organization, order, and harmony. Space helps to build a professional and polished image. Good use of space conveys a sense of luxury. Avoid cramming too much text into a small space. Overcome your sense of guilt that not every square inch is being used. Readers will actually read what you’ve written if you allow breathing room.
2. Hierarchy organizes text into various degrees of importance. Colour can help reinfornce that hierarchy.
3. Clustering is how elements are grouped together.
4. Imagery needs to share space with text and work harmoniously with it. Grids are an excellent way to ensure text and images align well.
5. Grids organize space into manageable chunks and align elements of space relative to one another.
