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Typography Reference 101:3. Character Anatomy

Jamie Homer — Sat, 03 Apr 2010 09:00:28 +0000

… and just when you thought the lesson in understanding the anatomical names of typeface ‘parts’ had finished! Here is part 2 of the exercise.

The list is endless to be fair, there are commonly accepted names and terminologies, and there are those that have been invented and over time, have become commonplace. For the purpose of the reference part of the site, we shall leave the naming thing at the 2 posts.

Typography Reference 101:2. Character Makeup

Jamie Homer — Sat, 27 Mar 2010 17:47:01 +0000

Welcome back. This lesson explains in very simple form, the anatomy names (many of which relate to human characteristics) of characters which makeup a typeface.

This post was inspired heavily by Jim Williams, design lecturer at Staffodshire Uni, thankyou Jim.

Typography Reference 101:1. The Basics

Jamie Homer — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 16:39:37 +0000

Happy New Year! Even if we are in month number 3!

The first post of the year will start a series of posts, which can be added to and used as a source of typographic reference. Before I start though, I make no apologies for potential incorrect apostrophe placement! So, without further ado, welcome to…

Typography Reference 101: 1. The Basics

Differentiate your levels of read with the key elements:
Size
Weight
Colour
Position
There is no need to introduce more fonts than is necessary, learn to put yourself in control of the type, not the other way around.

In a piece of design (editorial excluded) try to limit the amount of different font families to 2 ideally, but if it’s essential 3 families can be used at a push.
Set leading for bulk text at 3 points above your character size. Because fonts are designed differently (12 pt Meta may be a different physical height to 12 pt Perpetua), this may prove visually uncomfortable. If this is the case, use your designer powers to increase the leading by eye / hand manually.
Personal rule of thumb: when using sans serif fonts do not italicize words – it looks tasteless when set in sans serif.
When setting the weight of a font, use the family’s font weight not the character palette where possible. Character palettes are for lazy designers and they never represent the way the font should appear naturally in its’ proper weight. ie. use Arial Bold, not Arial with bold selected in the character palette.