Typography for all: Demystifying text for high-impact messages
Text is incredibly powerful—whether you’re making a business card or a garage-sale sign, you’re sending a message. The look of that message influences the way the receiver reacts: If the message is visually pleasing, the reaction is generally positive, but if the text is hard to read, that feeling of difficulty transfers back to you, the messenger. Here we’ll cover the basics of everyday typography, font pairings that are pleasing to the eye, practical formatting tips that work with a variety of software, and common mistakes to avoid.
Basics of typography
Before diving into formatting, let’s get a grasp on the lingo. Point size refers to the actual size of the text. The x-height is the size of the main character body, excluding any ascenders (bits of the character that extend above the x-height, such as in f or h) or descenders (bits that extend below the x-height, such as in g or y). The mean line or baseline is the imaginary line on which text sits.
Here you can see the different components of text.
Font family refers to the character design, whereas font style refers to variations of that same design, such as regular, light, bold, italic, and so on.
Fonts also come in different categories such as serif, which has lines extending from the main stroke of each character that resemble tiny feet (think Times or Hoefler); sans serif fonts don’t have feet (think Arial or Helvetica). Other categories include slab serif (same as serif but thicker in weight), decorative and display fonts (characters with ornate shapes or those that are really thick), and scripts (those that look like cursive handwriting).
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