At the very heart of any design will be the typography. It is perfectly possible to create a very effective layout using a sensitively handled piece of typography, unadorned by pictures or graphic devices of any kind. From their origins in calligraphy, through the invention of the woodblock and subsequently metal type to the digital setting of today, designers have been fascinated by letter forms.

It is no coincidence that they are referred to as typefaces, for each has its own character.

The last 20 years have seen an explosion of new type designs. Many designers will have access to hundreds or even thousands of fonts. Each font is part of a font family, typically comprising the regular (normal) weight plus italic, bold and bold italic, although some, particularly sanserif faces, can come in a much wider variety of weights plus condensed or extended variants. However there are a nucleus of perhaps 50 font families that are used more widely than all the rest put together.

Typecasting

Typefaces can be further categorized into generic groups. The earliest printing type designs were the serif faces, the serifs betraying the linking strokes of their calligraphic origin. Then came the slab serifs, with a much more even thickness of letter form and squarer serifs. The sanserifs (without serif) began to appear in the 19th century, although it was the advent of photosetting that made the enormous range of weights and widths a practical possibility. The Univers family consists of more than 20 fonts and Helvetica even more.

Alongside these were the script fonts, which could not generally be created as type because the letterforms needed to be joined, but they could be engraved into stone and, later, metal. Today, digital setting allows the individual characters to be set in exactly the right position to create the appearance of continuous script. Finally, there are a very large number of decorative faces available to the designer.

Space the face

Apart from the type size, two other factors are critical to good typography: leading (the space between lines) and word and letter spacing (track). Fonts will have a default specification for track, which will include pair kerning (selected pairs of characters that would otherwise be too close or too far apart). Always select fonts that are appropriate to the job and not simply because you like them, avoid distorting them unless you have a very good reason.

Many layouts are spoiled by too much or too little leading. Most text sizes will look comfortable with leading that is 120% of the type size-e.g., 10pt type, 12pt leading (10/12pt)-assuming that the text column is a normal width.

Wider text columns require more leading to ensure legibility. For headline sizes-approximately 36pt and larger-the amount of leading should be reduced as the point size increases. Novice designers should not deviate far from these specifications until they have gained confidence.
Experienced designers will specify a wide variety of track and leading in order to give a particular look to a publication, but they will always be mindful of the need for legible type.

Picas, points, ems …

For print-based work we still retain the system, devised long ago for metal typesetting, that uses the point as the basic unit of measurement, although some type vendors do also use metric sizes. An em space is equal to the relevant point size-i.e., with 10pt type an em space equals 10 points. An en is half the em space; a thin space is half an en. A pica is equal to 12 points.

…and pixels

For web-based work the basic unit of measurement is the pixel; these form a grid to fill the computer screen, e.g. 800 x 600 or 1024 x 768 pixels (width x depth ) are popular resolutions for 15 or 17 inch monitors.

The quality of on-screen type is constrained by the resolution used by the monitor screen. This is 72dpi on a Mac and 96dpi on a PC. Small sizes of type display badly on screen and unfortunately it is small sizes that are most commonly used for web work.

Although the screen looks quite smooth, compared to the printed image it is coarse; so when small type is fitted to a coarse grid, outline points may have to be rounded up or down causing features like serifs and stroke weights to become distorted. Hinting is a technique used to alleviate the problem when too few pixels are available to display a small letterform correctly.