tags
Language, WebDesign

Notes on fonts and font design.

Cool Fonts

Prose

Didot:
'Timeless elegance'; old and sophisticated.

Warnock
Powerful with a lot of glyphs. It's an Adobe font and is probablyexpensive.

Trajan
based on roman typography!

Bembo
Revival of monotype. Graceful, stable and elegant! More subtle than aDidot.

Futura
A classic futuristic font. Can be seen in places like Ableton'swebsite.

Garamond
Both a legal font and an exceptionally legible one.

Caslon
Organic, beautiful style – check this one out!

Freight Sans
fun and cartoonish font feel.

Open Sans
The new sans font with a neutral, flat design.

Gill Snas
warm british, a bit tall, crisp lines

Gotham
New York signage lettering style.

Bodoni
luxe, aspirational look font. more compressed and exaggerated

Univers
'the ultimate modernist font' - incredibly legible, clean, and functiona

Nagasaki
bold, condensed font for a large impact. looks very good in yellow, seeposter

Monospace

• source code pro
• jet brains mono
• pragmata pro
• dank mono
• victor mono
• menlo
• consolas
• roboto mono
• adore64
• hermit light
• opendyslexic mono
• cascadia code pl
• source code pro with emacs hasklig mode

Vocabulary

Design

Motion Design
Text in motion carefully chose to make text readable in videos and otheranimations. This text isn't visible all the time; rather, it's movingquickly and likely flashes past during a video.

Variable Fonts
One or more axes that provide variation between different extremes oftypeface design. These fonts allow for finer control over the design asit changes across the design space! A font can often be installed asregular, bold or both, and extended designs are expressed nicely.Formally, this is a specification that allows for multiple fonts to bepackaged in a single file.

typeface
A particular design of type. A single group of fonts; a set of fonts inthe same style, or 'font family'.

font
An instance of a typeface; a single weight of style within a typefacefamily.

Type

baseline
The line on which type sits.

height
THe distance from baseline to the top of the lowercase letters,disregarding tall letters such as h.

cap height
The distance between a capital letter and baseline.

ascenders
The stem above lowercase letters that extends above the alloted height.

descenders
Letters that extend below the baseline.

stem
The main stroke of the letter (usually vertical).

tail
Descending, decorative stroke on letters such as y and q.

serif
The flair extending off of the edge of letters. Defines a 'font family'(serif vs sans serif).

counter
The enclosed space within letters like o and g.

ear
The small extension on lower half of the letter g.

terminal
The end of a stroke without a serif.

aperture
Partially closed negative space in characters like c, s, and n. This isalways rounded.

bowl
The curved part of the character enclosing the circular or curved partsof letters. This occurs in letters like o, d and b.

kerning
Adjusting the space between individual characters.

tracking
The spacing of a group of characters.

alignment
text should probably be left aligned

justifying text
adding a straight edge to text on boht sides

measure
length of lines of text in a paragraph of column (column width)

Leading
Vertical line spacing. generating sufficient space between lines to makeit readable

Ligatures
Fusing characters that are next to one another that look very similar.These characters may look awkward when next to one another if theyaren't fused.

Hyphenation
Breaking a word across a line and separating it with a dash; a techniquetypically used to prevent rag problems.

hyphen
short dash '-'. used to divide words that break at the end of the lineor to connect parts of co mpound words such as 'ill-fated'. these areused to represent relationships between individuals rather th anseparating them.En-dash : slightly longer hthan the hyphe. used toindicate a range of values, such as a span of time or numericalquantities. sometimes the em-dash is used instead of the en-dash foraesthetic reasons, or a sm all amount of space is added befoer or afterthe dash for artistic purposes.Em-dash : longer than that!the em-dash istypically used to indicate a break in thought, and is normally followedwith and preceded by space. It can be used to describe a thought withina sentence as well – case in point!grid : guide by which graphicdesigners can organize, copy and add images in a flexible way whilemaking the concepts easy to absorb and understand.

Rag
The uneven vertical edge of a block of type – most commonly theright-hand edge. if the rag is not clean, it can be very distracting tothe eye; this can be fixed by reworking the line breaks or by editing acopy.

Widow
A single word or short line left at the end of a column. This isconsidered bad typography.

Orphan
A line exists at the top of the following column! This can be fixed justlike the rag, by reworking the line breaks or editing the copy to removethese typography misdeeds.

History

printing press
Used a font based on blackletter, similar ot the font traditionally usedwith handwritten material. This wasn't good for printing. Roman type wascreated to solve this problem. First, Jenson, but the most recognizableroman font is Cambria.

Italics

created to save space and money when printing books and long formtexts.paved road for old style, transitional style and modern styles oftyping.

Caslon

created 'old style' or 'Antiqua' of type : old style typefaces havethick serifs, low contrast. these are typically created from 1470 to1600.

Transitional typefaces

thin serifs with high contrasts between these types. Baskerville is onesuch font (which was created as an improvement to the caslon typeface!

Modern style

very thin serifs with extreme contrast between strokes. created toreject traditional styles, annoyed with typefaces based on handwriting!Modern style initiated by Firmin Didot and Giambatista Bodoni ; FirminDidot created modern style classification type, Didot, followed by theBodoni typefaces

William Caslon IV

sans serif typefaces – no projecting featues at the end of strokes!Helvetica : known as the favorite typeface, one of the most populat.variations on this include slab serifs and gemoetric sans. slab :magazines, newspaper headers; geometric : based on simple geometricshapes.

Susan Kare - great apple designer!

She did Chicago, a neat pixel sans-serif typeface – this could be coolto use, as well as Monaco - (kind of boring). Geneva is the thirdtypeface; it's inspired by helvetica and is a neo-grotesque typeface, arealist typeface including basic ligatures, long s and r rotunda asoptionals. bitmap fonts are very cool and I should look into using them!realist \~=grotesquemore reading (TODO)::https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sans-serif#GrotesqueCreative

Embellishments

indents: indenting the first line of every paragraph has always been aconvention – to create a visual separation between paragraphsCreativeieaas : extreme indent, outdent. with room and for a cleaner, more openlook, separate paragraph s with an extra line rather than using tabindentation at all!arabesques :; graphic ordaments and embellishments –from simple geometric designs to ornate configurations. many are oftendigital recreations of historic designs. they have many uses - have funwith them

Classifying Type

Serif

Traditional typefaces with feet or arms hanging off of the end of letterstrokes, adding a thick or thin look to the letter. These are consideredthe easiest fonts to read. Serif fonts are 'fancy' fonts – they all haveembellishments. Times New Roman, a serif font, is the most used font asthe most common font found in newspapers.

Examples
baskerville, clarendon, garamond, georgia, trajan

Sans-Serif

Fonts without serifs and having an overall more even stroke weight.clean, modern, minima list

Examples
arial, futura, impact, myriad, tahoma

Decorative

Fonts typically used only for attention-grabbing headlines. Only onedecorative font should be used, and not as the body font!

Script

Script fonts are intended to mimic handwriting, so the letters oftentouch one another. These fonts should never be used with all-caps.

Dingbats

These fonts contain characters that are small pieces of art, used toenhance the design of the page. Dingbats are usually packaged with aspecific font and mimic its style.

Best Practices

Font Size

On computers, 72 pt. font corresponds to one inch on paper. Twodifferent font sizes at the same point can correspond to differentphysical sizes, and correct size does depend on use.

Spacing

• character and word spacing, kerning, – space between each character orletter, adjusted to create pleasing look

tracking, – adjustment of word spacing, similar to kerning but refers tospace between words rather than characters line spacing, leading –amount of space between lines of type – larger the type, the moreleading needed! , paragraph spacing, alignment, – alignment : textflowing on a page. center, left, right etc. justified : straight edge onboht sides! line breaks and rag, hyphens, – don't have more than twohyphenations in a row, don't have too many hyphenated lines in a singleparagraph, ensure the rag checks out, make sure that justified textlooks natural widows and orphans – paragraph spacing – at end: widow; attop of following; orphan! do not leave these distracting shapes! editthe copy to remove them.

never use bold serif type, apparently? john cane is very against it.