Typography is text that is arranged to create a readable, coherent, and visually pleasing whole. It is important as a graphic designer to understand the important role typography can play in anything that you create. When using text that is strictly functional (books, newspaper or magazine articles) the text should not be noticeable or distract the reader; it should work almost invisibly without the reader's awareness. The goal is for the reader to be able to absorb the information on the page without any disruption of thought. Therefore, fonts must be chosen that achieve this primary goal.
Fonts
There are two primary type of fonts: Serif and Sans-Serif. All fonts fall into one of these two categories. Serif fonts have small designs on the ends of each letter (serifs) that help guide the horizontal flow of the eye when reading large amounts of small text. Sans-Serif fonts do not have the decorative end points so reading a lot of small text with this font style is very difficult and can cause the reader to skip lines of text. Generally, if the text will be printed and the font is smaller than 14pt, it's best to use a Serif font. If the text is larger than 16pt and/or there is not much of it on the page, it is more visually pleasing to use a Sans-Serif font. Most web designers prefer to use Sans-Serif fonts no matter what the size of the font is because it has a cleaner look which is ideal for most websites. Below are two examples of the most commonly used font styles for Serif fonts (Times New Roman) and Sans-Serif fonts (Arial) using 12pt font size:
Free or Not For Free?
The issues with using free fonts
A set of free fonts is included in the operating systems of all computers and most people are familiar with these standard fonts. In fact, most of us use these fonts everyday without ever realizing the amount of work that went into creating them. With over 772 characters and settings per font set, it could take years for a designer to create an entire font family. Because of this, there are copyright and licensing rules that apply when using fonts for commercial use. Generally, if you want to use a unique font in any designs that you are creating for a company or organization (logos, ads, brochures, etc.) you can either purchase this font yourself and include the cost in your design fee, or have the company or organization purchase the font so they can carry the license to use the font. Although there are many websites that offer free fonts to download, they are usually of poor quality and should not be used commercially.
Here are a few links to the top-rated professional font websites:
Here are some examples of high-quality fonts for sell on myfonts.com:
Another very helpful website is smashingmagazine.com which essentially searches the internet for the best articles and links for every aspect of graphic design so you don't have to. Here is a link:
Main Aspects of Type
There are four major aspects of type that graphic designers need to be familiar with: font format (size, color, regular, bold, or italic), Tracking, Leading (pronounced led'ing), and Kerning. Most software programs allow users to adjust the font formatting when working with text, but Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator also allow users to adjust the tracking, leading, and kerning (along with other options).
The following images illustrate what is meant by each of these terms. The Tracking is the spacing between all of the letters in a line of text, leading is the distance between each line of text, and kerning refers to the space between 2 adjacent letters.
In the next blog about typography, we will discuss typography as an art form and describe ways you can create art with text.
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