An exploration into the world of typography and fonts.
[icopyright horizontal toolbar] Do you lie awake at night fixated on your paragraph structure? Well probably not, but I’ll make the assumption that you want your writing to look good on the page or screen, and therefore care at least a little about paragraphs. Paragraphs express ideas. The classic ratio is one idea per paragraph.Read more about Paragraphs for the Paranoid[…]
Click here for reuse options! The vertical rhythm of a page is defined by the degree of leading employed. Leading determines whether the page seems crowded, pleasant, or empty.
Click here for reuse options! We began our discussion of horizontal movement last time. The glyphs that make up a font are each encircled by a precise amount of side-bearing space. Side-bearing by definition is uniform for monospaced types. But for proportional types, the amount of side-bearing applied to each character is one of the thousands of choices that are made by a font creator.
Click here for reuse options! The major factors controlling the density of words on the page (known as the “color” of the page) relate to the horizontal and vertical axes of text. It is the job of a typesetter to not only create legible text, but also text that has an even color. The factors include the horizontal design elements of a font, the space between words and the space between letters.
Click here for reuse options! Long associated with hand-formed letters, fonts became mechanized by the first printing presses and soon added variety and style to the then new phenomenon of machine-printed books.
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