Describing Type

Typeface/Fonts

• A typeface is a design for a set of characters. Popular typefaces include Times New Roman, Helvetica and Courier.

• A font is a combination of typeface and other qualities such as size, pitch and spacing.

Upper Case and Lower Case

• Upper case letters are generally large and in some cases have different versions of a letter (e.g – G g, Q q). Upper case letters are used at the start of a sentence, the start of a name, place or something important. Lower case letters are used on the rest of the words.

Numerals

• A numeral us a figure, symbol, or group of figures or symbols denoting a number.

Glyph

• A glyph is a hieroglyphic character or symbol. A glyph conveys distinctions in meanings or sounds and has no intrinsic meaning. It can be an alphabetic or numeric font or some other symbol that pictures an encoded character.

Other common glyphs

• Other common glyphs include question mark, exclamation mark, ampersand, asterisk, commercial ‘at’, bullet point, full stop, comma. These are generally used as punctuation in the English language.

Point Size (pt)

• The point size is a relative measure of the size of a font. It use to have a more concrete meaning in the ‘old days’ of typography. It is typically measured from the vertical measurement of the lettering.

Leading

• Leading refers to the distance between the baselines of successive lines of type. The term originated in the days of hand-typesetting, when thin strips of lead were inserted into the forms to increase the vertical distance between the lines of type.

Alignment Styles• This is the setting of text flow or image placement relative to

the ‘canvas’. The edge of the page is known as a margin and a gap between columns is known as a gutter. Flush left is the text aligned along the left margin or gutter, also known as left-aligned, ragged right or ranged left. Flush right is aligned along the right. Ragged right refers to the sentence length towards the right in a column, this also applies to ragged left but the opposite way round.

Kerning

• The kerning is the spacing between characters in a piece of text to be printed.

Tracking

• Letter spacing is generally called tracking in typography and it refers to a consistent degree of increase or decrease of a space between letters to affect density.

Dingbats

• A dingbat in typography is an ornament, character, or spacer used in typesetting.