A Typography Primer

June 28, 2014

  • Body text is the key, because there’s more of it

  • Four main items for body text, point size (10-12 for print, 15-25 for web)

  • Line spacing is the vertical distance between lines, which should be 120-145% of the point size. The CSS is “line-height”

  • Line length is the width of the text blog, and it should be 45-90 characters, or 2-3 lowercase alphabets. PT uses 12-13 word per line.

  • Biggest thing is font choice: buy a font like equity or concourse.

  • Best thing you can do is upgrade your fonts to something professional

  • Avoid times new roman and arial

  • Use curly quotations, not straight ones

  • Only one space between sentences

  • Don’t use multiple whitespaces in a row

  • Never use underline unless it’s a hyperlink

  • Rarely use centered text

  • Use very little bold or italic

  • ALL CAPS are ok for less than a line

  • Don’t use small caps if you don’t hav ethe real thing

  • Use 5-12% extra letter spacing with small caps

  • KERNING should always be turned on (adjusting the space between characters in a proporotional font)a word space is the distance between two words, and it should only be one use of the spacebar–noever more

  • There’s such a thing as  

  • Justified text needs hyphenation

  • Hyphens and dashes are not the same. Hyphens connect words, dashes are pauses

  • Don’t use ampersands much

  • Put a nonbreaking space after paragraph and section marks

  • Make sure apostrophes point downward

  • Make sure foot and inch marks are straight, not curly

  • Typography is the visual component of the written word

  • A text stays the same no matter how it’s rendered, but when you print it typography is involved

  • Fonts are part of typography, but they are not the same. Typography goes beyond font

  • Typography is for the reader, not the writer

  • Treat reader attention as a luxury that you must preserve

  • Typography is not supposed to disappear; it’s supposed to be a visible as necessary to do the job of enhancing the text

  • Straight quotes are from teh typewriter, in traditional printing all quotes were curly. Typewriters nerfed them to save space. Never use straight quotes

  • Emphasis is done with bold or italic, not quotes

  • Straight quotes are ok in email–especially on a mobile phone

  • Don’t use two single quotes

  • One space between sentences

  • Change things into questions. Use the question mark.

  • The exclamation point is overused. You get one exclaimation point per three pages.Never use more than one – exclamation point

  • Semicolons to combine two sentences, also separates liste lements with internal commas

  • The colon is for introducing and then completing an idea. I own three cars: a convertible, a sedan, and an minivan.

  • The paragraph mark is known as a pilcrow

  • Parenthesis are for separating citations or asides from teh body

  • Brackets show changes within quoted material

  • Braces should not be used outside of technical stuff

  • If you use braces or parents, do not match the bold or italicized of teh text

  • Heyphens break words across lines, multi-part words, phrasal adjectives (dog and poony show, high-scool grades

  • There are two dashes, the en and the em. The em is teh sise of a capital H, and the smaller one is half that size. Don’t use hyphens to build them.

  • The en dash is for ranges of values and contrasting words like conservative-liberal split

  • The em dash breaks a snetence into pieces using a pause. It’s when a comma is too weak, but a colon/semi/or parents is too strong (underused).

Notes

  1. This content is pulled from Butterick’s Typography guide.

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