x

2. WHAT IS TYPOGRAPHY?
• Typography: The study of all elements of type including the
shape, size and spacing of the characters
• Typography plays an important role in the audience
perception of your document or project and its information
• Typography helps to create “information relationships” in two
ways:
• By the organization of your information
• Keeping things interesting through the use of fonts, letters
and symbols

3. PRINCIPLES OF DESIGN FOR TYPOGRAPHY
• Legibility: Making sure the audience can read and understand your
text
• Reverse type: white type on a dark background and is designed
to make type stand out
• Similarity, alignment: Using typography to create relationships
between similar kinds of information
• Uniformity or consistency: Repeating familiar elements to focus your
audience’s attention
• Contrast: Creating interest and distinguishing different types of
information with different typefaces
• Hierarchy: Making sure your audience understands that
information has different levels of importance

4. FONTS
• Font: Originally included typeface, style and size, but the term
is now interchangeable with typeface
• Font Family: A typeface and all its variants such as Times
New Roman regular, italic and bold
• Roman: describes a font without additional attributes such as
italics
• Decorative fonts: are those used for display purposes
• Script fonts: designed to imitate handwriting
• Blackletter fonts: Imitate an antique European font
• Monospace fonts: Fonts that mimic the spacing produced by a
typewriter

5. TYPEFACES
• Typeface: The design for the letters, numbers and symbols that
make up a font
• Serif: a typeface with extensions at the ends of the main strokes
that define each letter. These extensions are called serifs.
• Bracketed serif: a curved serif that fills in the area between the serif
and the stroke
• Sans serif: a typeface without serifs
• Oldstyle fonts: have bracketed serifs, angled stress, and strokes that
move gently from thick to thin
• Transitional fonts: have bracketed serifs, vertical stress and uneven
strokes that move quickly from thick to thin
• Modern fonts: have unbracketed serifs, vertical stress and uneven
strokes
• Slab Serif Fonts: have heavy serifs, vertical stress and even strokes

6. EXAMPLES
Serif Font Sans Serif Font

7. SPACING CHOICES
• Proportional fonts: are spaced according to the size of the letter
• Monospace fonts: are spaced the same for every letter
• Tracking: the spacing between letters in a word
• Kerning pairs: sets of letters designed to be spaced closely together
• Kerning: spacing of letters generally to make them move closer together
• Ligatures: Letters that have historically been attached, creating a single
character
• Leading: The spacing between lines of a paragraph
• Em space: a space the width of a capital letter “M” in the font and point size
being used
• En space: half the size of an em space, is the width of a capital letter “N” in
the font and point size being used

8. SPACING CONVENTIONS
• Hanging indents: a paragraph’s first line is flush left but the
remaining lines are indented
• Tabs: places on a ruler used to line up text
• Widows: Single sentences or phrases at the bottom of a
column or page. The rest of the paragraph appears on the
next page or column
• Orphans: Single lines of text that appear at the top of the
column or page, with the rest of the paragraph appearing in
the previous column or page

9. ALIGNMENT
• There are four primary types:
• Left Aligned: Often referred to as “left justified” or “flush
left”, typically the default setting for a document, begins
each line along the left margin of the document
• Right Aligned: Often referred to as “right justified” or “flush
right”, it aligns the beginning of each line of text along the
right margin of the document
• Centered: Text is placed in the center of each line leaving
the same margin on both sides
• Justified: Each line of text fills the entire space from left to
right, except for the paragraph indent and the last line of
the paragraph