The absolute basics of Typography
October 19, 2015The subject of typography is vast and just as equally important. Many believe it to be one of the most important components of visual design. This week I created a typography project to coincide with my blog post. The project was pretty interesting as I learned a lot and was able to play with a variety of colors and typefaces.
What is typography?
Typography is the design and use of typefaces as a means of communication.
What’s the difference between typeface and font?
One of the things I learned very early into my career as a designer is that, technically speaking, a font is not the same as a typeface. Even though the words can pretty much be used interchangeably nowadays, it is important to understand the differences.
One of the best lines I have read that describes the difference between typeface and font was from Fast Company. The quote reads, “The difference between a font and a typeface is the same as that between songs and an album.”
Applying this logic, it becomes relatively simple to distinguish the difference between a typeface and a font. Just likes songs within an album, numerous fonts make up a typeface.
The anatomy of type
The anatomy of characters is how we tell the difference between one typeface and another. The differences between typefaces is all in it’s anatomy. Anatomy is why one typeface may be large and thick, while another may appear smaller and thin.
There are quite a few features that allow us to distinguish the similarities and differences between typefaces. A great resource that highlights all the different parts of character anatomy can be found at Typedia.
What the heck is vertical rhythm?
As I touched on in my project, vertical rhythm helps us stay organized by using evenly spaced horizontal lines as a guide for how we want our elements displayed. This is very similar to how we use lines on a piece of notebook paper. If used correctly, this makes a nice addition to our toolset and really adds to creating good hierarchy on our projects.
Since I have started learning about design I never really knew what vertical rhythm was. I thought being consistent and using the same margin and line-height on all of my type was the best way of doing things. The Modular Scale is great resource that helps us try to find the perfect font sizes so we can maintain our vertical rhythm.
Hierarchy and line length
Early on during my learning something was pointed out to me. I was told that my line length looked off and was too long. When I heard that I really didn’t really understand what it meant.
Basically, line length refers to how many characters we fit on to a single line. The ideal range for line length is somewhere between 45 and 75 characters, but most regard 66 as the sweet spot. To achieve a line length that is considered satisfactory we must choose our container width and font sizes carefully.
Wrapping up
Over the last weeks I feel like I have really learned a lot. Although challenging at times, I enjoy coming to work and learning about something new each day. I know eventually that the hard work will pay off. My plan throughout these next few weeks is to adopt these practices I have learned about and slowly integrate them into my personal website and future projects going forward.
Thanks for reading!