Typography is the study of type including letter shape, size, and spacing. It plays an important role in how an audience perceives information. Typography helps create relationships between information through organization and use of fonts. Key principles of typographic design include legibility, contrast, hierarchy, and consistency to focus audience attention and distinguish different information levels. Fonts refer to specific typeface designs that come in families with variants like bold or italic. Common typefaces include serif, sans serif, slab serif, and decorative or script fonts. Spacing choices involve proportional or monospace fonts as well as tracking, kerning, leading, and indentation conventions.

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