Some tips on type

From

Before & After: Graphics for Business

By John McWade

Vocabulary

Serif

Sans serif

Legibility

Readability

Type and typeface

X-height

Counters

Mirrors

Serif – a small cross stroke at the end of a main stroke of a letter

Sans serif – a letter without serifs

S S

SerifSans Serif

S

For large amounts of text—a solid page or more—serif type is easier than sans serif for the reader to deal with. There are a few theories why.

1. It’s what we’re most accustomed to

2. It’s more organic and graceful

3. Letters create a bridge from one letter to the next

The hallmarks of good type are legibility and readability.

Legibility refers to clarity. It’s how readily one letter can be distinguished from all others.

Readability refers to how well letters interact to compose words, sentences and paragraphs.

To flow most smoothly, an alphabet’s characters should have similar widths. Reading has a natural rhythm; an alphabet such as Futura (top left) with widely varying character widths, disrupts it.

We identify letters by their physical characteristics—stems, bars, loops, curves, and so on; the clearer they are the more legible the letter. Expanding or compressing letters makes them harder to read.

X-height is the height of the lowercase characters in a typestyle

Counters are the enclosed spaces inside letters. Avoid typestyles whose counters are very large in relation to the stroke weight.

Geometric typestyles are so uniform, their letters are often mirror images. For text, this is not ideal—the more distinct each letter is, the more legible whole words will be. Look for typestyles that don’t mirror, such as Gill Sans (bottom).