Not my type
If there’s one class that gets slept through a little too consistently in design school - it’s typography. There’s something about it that can seem so unattainable to some designers, and yet - like most things in life - it’s a simple mix between art and science. Easy to learn - hard to master.
Typography for the ages
Part of the reason type is so fascinating to me is because it is a visual representation of our most precious cultural touchstone - language. Even the lay person can look at a piece of type and instantly recognize the time period it came from. Think of everything from as far back as the Victorian era and the arts and crafts movement, to the modernism era. They all had distinguishable characteristics that even now, transport us to a time we never lived through. The graphic styles speak almost as much as the words and meaning they represent do. Even as recently as the 1950s through the 1970’s, each decade seems to have its own distinguishable typographic style.
Then a remarkable shift happened only within the last couple of decades. Designers began making the shift from typesetting by hand to typesetting by key stroke. The computer brought about great efficiency in some respects, but along with that, there was a price to pay. Now it was easy to open up a computer program, select a typeface and start typing away - and gone was the need for an understanding of typography.
In practice
Even now, some so called ‘designers’ know very little about typography, though this study is central to the very basic principles of graphic design. I once had the misfortune of working with a very arrogant (and untalented) individual who prided himself on his “fontography” skills. That’s right, to him, the only knowledge needed was in choosing the right typeface.
However, there is more to it. Remember the part where I said it’s an art and a science? Great typography is about knowing the rules, and then knowing how to break them. It’s about communicating in a way thats practical and methodical and easily read, but also about communicating a feeling by the way your letters appear, the place your words sit, and how your paragraphs are positioned on the page.
Question is, how will people remember our era? By keeping in mind the basics, you can take your designs to a whole new level, and keep our time from being remembered as the era of ugly type:
Letters - the building blocks of typography
It’s important to know the anatomy of letters and words. Remember how you used to print on looseleaf in the elementary days? You would have 3 horizontal lines that you would be used for each line of print. The top line would be where the top of your capital letters started (In typography this is the cap-height), the middle line would be where your lowercase letters reached their height (the x-height), and the bottom line would be where all the bottoms of your letters would sit (the baseline). And then you would have some lowercase letters that would go beyond the x-height and the baseline. For example the lowercase “d” has what’s called an ascender which reaches the cap-height even though it’s lowercase. The letter “y” has a descender which goes below the baseline.
Is all of this just useless head knowledge though? Check out what some designers have done by simply manipulating the anatomy of letters.
Text
When letters sit together, they form text. Knowing how to place letters next to each other is key to good typography. For example, one of the most common type blunders are not kerning letters. Take for example the word “Fan”. At small sizes you don’t notice the fact that the letter ‘a’ should slide in underneath the ‘F’. When set at large sizes though, it becomes apparent. The computer automatically sets the ‘F’ and the ‘a’ to have the same distance apart from each other as other letters. However, you have to override what the computer is doing automatically for aesthetics.
Paragraphs
One thing you have to pay attention to is the shape and size of paragraphs of text. Our eyes are not meant to read extremely long wide columns of text. It is much easier to read narrow columns, because your eye can skim in one place without having to travel long distances. Another common oversight among amateur typographers is not cleaning up orphans and widows.
When a new paragraph begins at the bottom of a column of text, or conversely if a paragraph ends at the top of a new column - that’s an orphan. It just doesn’t look right. Its better to break the column prematurely than to have this happen. Similarly, a widow is where one word has it’s own line at the end of a paragraph. Better to break the second-last line prematurely and let the poor widow have a companion.
When good type goes bad - a list of felonies
This is what not to do:
Do not run text vertically like Chinese characters (ie: all the letters have different baselines). Roman characters were not meant to do this. Instead, if you want a vertical line of text, simply rotate the whole line. It’s better to have to read the text sideways than up and down.
Using justified text on narrow columns. You know how newspapers have “Rivers” or large gaps between letters that make strange patterns through a paragraph? That’s what not to do. Narrow columns should use left or right alignment. Type does not have to be perfectly symmetrical to be legible.
Stretching letters. You see it all the time. Somebody wants to make a line of text fit how they want it, so he/she stretches the letters horizontally or vertical. This is bad! A common analogy with typography is to make the shoe fit, not the foot. In other words, create a flexible design, that can accommodate what you need it to, without forcing letters or typefaces to do what you want them to.
These are just a few of the things that go a long way toward making communication design practical, beautiful and meaningful.
And the extra credit question: What’s the difference between a font and a typeface? A font is the computer file that makes a typeface what it is. In other words, it is correct to say “I don’t have that font on my machine”. It is not correct to say “I love the look of that font”. The characteristics that make letters aesthetically pleasing, or identifiable are referred to as a typeface. So it is correct to say “That’s a beautiful typeface”, not “You need to copy over the typefaces to your computer”.
For more great tips on basic typography see Thinking with type