Typography

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Typography

• The art of letter style and design

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The different styles are called typefaces. Many
of the types are given the name of the designer
who created them, or the name of the design era
it originated from.
E.g. Times New Roman, Tudor, Victorian, Old
English, Bauhaus, Caesar, Edwardian, etc.
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Different styles of type faces can create
different appearances, thoughts and
attention. The name given to a variety of
characters in the same size and style is a
font. Typefaces/fonts are measured by points.
CAPITAL letters are classed as being in upper
case . . . . . . while small letters are lower
case.
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Serif and Sans-Serif
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Letters with serifs look like this
While letters without serifs (sans-serifs) do not
have the additional stokes, so look like this
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Typefaces can be changed by adapting the size,
weight, colour and spacing around it.
However, a major factor to consider is legibility.
Quick changes which can be made to a type face by
adding

• Bold
• Italics
• Shadows, etc.

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• Other aspects of typography to be considered are
• Word spacing
• Letter spacing
• Line spacing

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Line Spacing
With a line spacing too small the letters will
merge together. Especially with ascending letters
e.g. b, d, f, h, k, l, t . . . and also with
descending letters e.g. g, j, q, y. The space
between each line of text is known as leading.
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Word spacing
This is the spacing between words. The space
between words in lower case letters should be the
size of a small o. The space between words in
capital letters should be the size of a large
O.
Thisisthespacingbetweenwords.
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Letter spacing
This is the space between each letter. In some
cases letters need to be adjusted to make sure
the word is visually even spaced this is known
as kerning.
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Take a look the below image of a newspaper
heading.
Compare it to the second image. Which looks the
most professional?
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Quick Questions What does san-serif mean?
Give two changes which can be quickly made to a
typeface.
What is kerning?
Give an example of two ascending and descending
letters.
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