Stroke, Contrast, and Stress

Before the days of movable type, scribes often used a broad-tipped nib pen dipped in ink to individually construct each stroke in a letterform. A stroke could move vertically, horizontally, diagonally, or in a curved direction. In hand lettering, the width of a stroke can vary as the angle and direction of the nib changes with the movement of the pen. This is particularly noticeable in characters with curved strokes, such as in an O, C, and Q.

The transition between the thick and thin areas of a stroke is called contrast (see Figure 8.5). Low-contrast typefaces have little to no variation between the thick and thin portions of a stroke. In high-contrast typefaces, the stroke transitions are more pronounced, often allowing users to read the letters more easily. Stress is the location or angle of a transition from thick to thin or vice versa. In vertical stress fonts, the transition occurs at the top and bottom of the vertical axis. In angled stress fonts, the transition takes place off-axis, either slightly to the left of center (left angled) or to the right of center (right angled).

Figure 8.5 Left: Garamond is considered a high-contrast font because of the stark difference in the width of the strokes used to form a single character. Right: Arial Black, on the other hand, has a consistent width for each stroke segment.

Weight: Regular, Boldface, and Light

Bold typefaces (also known as boldface) increase the width of the stroke and the visual weight of the regular roman letterform. The letterforms, serifs, and character spacing of boldface type are redesigned to accommodate the increase in stroke thickness, so letters have adequate counterform, or white space between and within them. Light typefaces are the opposite of boldface, with small stroke widths.

Posture: Roman, Oblique, and Italic

Letterforms have postures. In typography, the term Roman with an uppercase R refers to the inspiration of certain typefaces and to categories of typeface. The word roman with a lowercase r, however, refers to upright typefaces. Letters with other postures— oblique and italic—usually slant to the right, often by about 12 degrees. Oblique typefaces have letterforms based on roman counterparts. Italic typefaces have features that emulate handwritten forms. A true italic typeface contains visual features consistent with, but not necessarily included in, the roman version of the typeface.

Proportions and Letterform Parts

Figure 8.6 illustrates the basic characteristics of a typeface. In a row of type, the bottom edge of each character’s main body rests on an imaginary plane called the baseline. Uppercase letters have their tops at the capline. Flat-topped lowercase letters have their tops at the mean line, and the relative size of a typeface is denoted by its x-height, or the distance between the mean line and the baseline, most easily measured using a lowercase x. The counter is the enclosed or partially enclosed open area in letters such as O and G. Typefaces with larger x-heights and counter sizes are often easier to read. An ascender is any part of a lowercase character that extends above the x-height, such as in the vertical stem of the letter b or h. A descender is any part of a character that extends below the baseline, such as in the bottom stroke of a y or p. Most typefaces are proportional, meaning the type width for each letterform varies, so an l sits close to neighboring letters, taking up less space than an m. Some typefaces are monospaced: spacing is uniform, so an l and m take up the same horizontal space. Monospaced typefaces are less readable for ordinary purposes, but they are used to illustrate code and in coding applications, such as Dreamweaver for web design, when you need to be able to distinguish each letter.

Figure 8.6 The characteristics, illustrated here, not only define each typeface, but also help determine a typeface’s suitability for various uses.

Source: Susan A. Youngblood.

Serifs are small marks located on the ends of a main character stroke (see Figure 8.7). Serif typefaces contain serifs, while sans serif typefaces do not. Which is better for print, and which is better for electronic display? Even a few years ago, experts would have said that serif typefaces were better for printed materials such as books because the serifs help with horizontal flow, or help guide readers’ eyes across long lines of text. Some of this research on print readability has been called into question; at most, the difference made by serifs is small. Other research suggests that sans serif typefaces are better for electronic displays. Why? Serifs are small, so lower-resolution displays don’t have enough pixels to cleanly render the serifs. Sans serif typefaces are usually better for computer monitors and video. As you make typeface choices, consider specific font characteristics that improve legibility, not just categories. Also consider what your users expect in a given context, which is often serif typefaces for print and sans serif for electronic media.

Figure 8.7 Serifs are decorative accents added to the end of a stroke.

Serif Typefaces

There are six main groups of serif typefaces: Blackletter, Humanist, Old Style, Transitional, Modern, and Slab Serif (see Figure 8.8, top). Serif typefaces are the industry standard for body copy that’s printed in books, magazines, and newspapers. Even if new research calls into question readability differences on paper, readers are used to serif typefaces in these contexts. Digital technology can have trouble displaying serifs, so unless you’re using a serif typeface designed for the digital display, such as Georgia, you’re usually better off relying on serif typefaces for large headings or for print media.

From Blackletter to Old Style Typefaces

When movable type was invented, typeface designers simply copied the style of written forms onto the surface of metal type. Since traditional pen-based forms were familiar to the pioneers of printing, it seemed natural to them to design movable type in the same style that had been used for centuries. After all, this is what people were visually accustomed to. Because of Gutenberg’s origins, it’s no surprise that the Gothic script known as Blackletter was the first letterform to be widely adapted to metal type throughout the Germanic regions of Europe. While highly decorative, Blackletter type is composed of heavy angular strokes with few curves, making it a rather bold typeface that’s difficult to read in small print. The Gutenberg Bible, the first book ever mass-produced with a printing press, used Blackletter type. Gutenberg used a two-column design with forty-two lines of text per page. The typeface could be read because the font was big, but the Gutenberg Bible was quite large and heavy when finished.

Figure 8.8 Typefaces and typeface categories have evolved over the centuries. These examples are typical of their categories, but some were created later than the earliest dates listed for a given category.

Source: Susan A. Youngblood.

As printing moved into southern Europe, the more efficient and elegant forms of Roman lettering greatly influenced the design of metal type. Humanist (also known as Venetian) typefaces were the result. Like Blackletter, they are dark on the page and have sloped crossbars in the lowercase e, but despite their low contrast, they were considered an improvement over their Gothic predecessor. Humanist letterforms have more rounded and gentler strokes and are much easier to read in small print than Blackletter, despite having relatively small x-heights. Many of the serifs on lowercase letters are slanted, and serifs tend to be bracketed: the serifs connect to the main stroke with a curve, providing a smooth and gentle transition from the thick to thin areas of a font. Soon after, italic typefaces were developed; they allowed printers to put more words on a line and are still used for emphasis. Old Style (also known as Garalde) typefaces are similar to Humanist typefaces but are distinguished by a somewhat more vertical stress and horizontal crossbars in the lowercase e. Old Style typefaces include Garamond, Bembo, and Caslon and remain popular.

Sans Serif Typefaces

Sans is a French word meaning “without,” thus sans serif (also known as lineal) typefaces are those that are literally without serifs; they are sometimes also referred to as gothic or grotesque because some earlier typeface designers found them unattractive. Sans serif type was used to emboss pages for blind readers beginning in 1789 and was developed for printing for sighted readers in 1816. The popularity of sans serif typefaces boomed in the 20th century. Type designers strove to create basic letterforms, devoid of the excessive design elements of modern and slab serif type. Sans serif typefaces obviously have no serifs and usually have uniform strokes with little to no contrast and a vertical stress in rounded strokes. These typefaces are also broken into categories: humanist for varieties that have an angled stress, nongeometric counters, and contrast; geometric for varieties that have vertical stresses, geometric counters, and no contrast; and transitional for those in between (see Figure 8.8, bottom).

Sans serif typefaces are ideal for text headings and titles in print and for use in electronic media where lower resolution can make serifs hard to render cleanly. Because of this, sans serif fonts are often the best choice when designing body copy for the Web or other channels of electronic distribution.

Figure 8.9 These decorative fonts were downloaded under a freeware license from urbanfonts.com, a popular font-sharing website that provides access to thousands of free and commercial fonts.

Source: http://www.urbanfonts.com.

Decorative Typefaces

Decorative typefaces connote a sense of mood, emotion, or attitude (see Figure 8.9). They have personality, which is great for attracting attention but does little for enhancing the readability of the text in small form. Decorative typefaces are characterized by unusual features intended to add splash and pizzazz to a design. Because they’re purposely designed to draw lots of attention to themselves, they should be used in moderation.

Script Typefaces

Script typefaces are among the easiest letterforms to categorize because they so clearly attempt to emulate the cursive style of handwriting or the artistic appearance of calligraphy. Script typefaces are slanted, and a stroke connects adjoining letters and preserves linear flow. Script typefaces are popular with commercial printers when they need to create a formal text design such as in a wedding invitation or certificate of achievement, when readability is less of a concern than the overall feel of the document. Because of their thin strokes and angled form, these typefaces generally have a weak appearance when rendered out to electronic displays.

Symbol Typefaces and Special Characters

There will undoubtedly come a time when you need to insert a special character or symbol that’s not found on your keyboard, such as those shown in the following.

Many common symbols—such as currency symbols, mathematical operators, accented letters, and copyright marks—are included in the Universal Character Set established by the ISO/IEC standard 10646. Depending on which program you’re using, many special characters can be added to a document by combining a modifier key on the keyboard with a second key or character code (or Unicode). For example, pressing OPTION+G on a Mac keyboard produces ©, the international copyright symbol. On a standard English Windows keyboard, the same character can be inserted by typing ALT+169. The advantage of this method is that the design of the inserted character matches the style of the currently active typeface. It is a part of the same font family and therefore blends seamlessly with the surrounding type. Unfortunately, the Universal Character Set does not include everything. As an alternative, you can use a dingbat (or symbol) typeface, such as Symbol, Wing-ding, Webdings, or Zapf Dingbats (see Figure 8.10). Symbol typefaces are popular because they include many ornamental characters not found elsewhere. However, they will not blend as naturally when mixed with another typeface.

Figure 8.10 Many programs and operating systems include a character or keyboard map that allows you to view, select, and insert special characters into an open document. Here, the Glyphs panel in Adobe Photoshop CC is used to insert symbols from the Wingdings font family.

Source: Adobe product screenshot reprinted with permission from Adobe Systems Incorporated.

Computers and Typefaces

The vast majority of the typefaces (and their fonts) on your computer were designed for the high-resolution medium of printing. When rendered digitally, printer fonts are often difficult to read, especially when they are small, bold, script, or italic or have thin strokes or tricky-to-display serifs. Georgia and Verdana were among the first typefaces created specifically for display on computer monitors. They have good x-heights, large counters, easily distinguished characters (for instance, uppercase i and lowercase l), and distinctive bold. In readability testing for the Web, Verdana consistently scores high marks and is one of the most popular screen fonts used for body copy on the Web.

In order for a web browser to accurately display text in a web page, all the fonts used in its design must reside on the client computer. When the browser is unable to locate a font that’s specified in the HTML code, it will perform a font substitution, swapping out the intended typeface with a local one. Font substitution can significantly change the look of a page from what was originally intended. To ensure font compatibility with other systems, select a font from one of the following families: Arial, Comic Sans, Courier New, Georgia, Impact, Times New Roman, Trebuchet MS, Symbol, and Verdana. These are standard fonts that come with all Windows and Mac computer systems. They’re also considered to be web safe, meaning they are supported by all the most popular web browsers.

Relying solely on safe fonts can limit your creativity. As an alternative, text can be saved as a graphic image and uploaded to the Web in JPEG or GIF format. With the typeface embedded inside the text graphic, users don’t need to have the matching font installed on their local computers to view it. However, use images of text only for titles, headers, and display text: search engines do not have the ability to locate text when it’s embedded in a graphic, and users with disabilities need you to provide alternative text for every image, which can be cumbersome if you have a text-heavy image. If you choose to create limited text in images, consider using an OpenType font: these fonts are scalable and cross-platform, so they’ll look right if you move between a Mac and PC during your project.

Tech Talk

Category Characteristics

A typeface’s characteristics help determine which category it fits in and what it is best used for.

Figure 8.11 The fonts shown here are designed and sold by Linotype, a commercial type foundry that specializes in commercial typefaces for professional designers. Founded in 1886, Linotype designers have created a large collection of fonts including familiar ones such as Gil Sans, Helvetica, Optima, Palatino, and Papyrus.

Source: http://www.linotype.com.

True and Faux Font Styles

Font styles, or font-family variations, are used by designers to add visual variety and emphasis to text by varying the weight, angle, and width of the typeface. Most font families include the four basic styles of roman (upright), bold, italic, and bold italic. Font styles usually look better when they are true font styles—ones in which the designer carefully changed each glyph during design—rather than faux font styles—computer-generated effects that simulate font adaptations to create faux bold and faux italics. Faux styles often produce a look that’s different from what the designers of the font intended (see Figure 8.13). Professional designers prefer the authentic look of true font styles because the size, shape, and spacing of each letterform are custom designed to be consistent with the overall look of the typeface; they tend to avoid faux styles because they are aesthetically less pleasing than the real thing. Some typefaces have more true font styles than others.

Figure 8.12 The Character panel in Adobe Photoshop CC can be used for modifying the appearance of selected text in a visual design.

Source: Adobe product screenshot reprinted with permission from Adobe Systems Incorporated.

Figure 8.13 The difference between true bold and italic styles and faux effects is quite dramatic when you compare them side by side.

Italics and Boldface for Emphasis

When used in moderation, changing a word or short phrase to italics can be a subtle, effective, and elegant way to emphasize text. Just be sure not to overdo it, and be careful about italics for digital media: they can be difficult to read. If you want to emphasize text using italics, select a font family that includes a true italic. Like italics, boldface type is used to add emphasis to selected words in body text and headings and should be used sparingly within a design. As the name implies, this typeface style is Bold! and will call more attention to the text than its italic counterpart. And some font families—such as Verdana and Georgia—have been designed so the counters (the open spaces in some letters) of their bold versions still appear open on digital displays. These font families also have ample weight differences between their roman and italic fonts, allowing users to pick out bold words easily. Applying a faux bold effect simply thickens the stroke of an existing roman form without changing a character’s style or spacing, producing a proportionally smaller amount of white space in counters and between each character, making text more difficult to read. As with italics, choose a font family with a true boldface.

Condensed or Expanded Type

Some font families include typefaces in which the width and height of the type are purposely disproportional. Condensed typefaces appear tall and thin, while expanded typefaces look somewhat short and fat (see Figure 8.14). Each can be simulated by modifying the selected text with the vertical or horizontal scaling controls in the Photoshop Character palette. For normal scaling, both controls should be set to 100%. To increase or decrease the vertical or horizontal scale of type, adjust the percentages up or down in the appropriate entry field. Vertical and horizontal scaling are virtual effects that merely stretch out type. As a result, they are not nearly as pleasing to the eye as a true condensed or expanded typeface.

All Caps and Small Caps

Normal uppercase letters or caps (short for capitals) are created by holding down the shift key while typing. In the Character palette, you also have the option of formatting text in ALL CAPS or SMALL CAPS. The all caps option sets the selected type in uppercase so the top of capital letters touch the normal capline. The small caps option also sets type in uppercase, but at a reduced height that’s closer to the size of lowercase letters. As a result, small caps are not as visually overwhelming as true uppercase letters. Small caps are often used by designers when it’s necessary to type a string of all uppercase letters, as with certain abbreviations and acronyms (NASA versus NASA). Using small caps instead of all caps helps keep regular portions of narrative text from being unintentionally overemphasized.

Figure 8.14 Type can be condensed, expanded, scaled, and stretched to achieve a desired effect.

The shape of a word—the letter width, counters, ascenders, and descenders— helps us read, so use uppercase letters sparingly. The brain recognizes words by their physical shape as a unit and not by the individual letters they are composed of. In other words, people do not read letters so much as they read composite shapes in the form of words and phrases. Setting type in all uppercase letters (even small caps) takes away distinctive features, hurting readability. Think about street signs: one labeled “Washington St.” is easier to read, especially from a distance, than one labeled “WASHINGTON ST.” When words are composed entirely of caps, their distinctive shape is lost and people have to work harder to discern them. As a general principle, avoid using caps to emphasize text, and also avoid mixing upper and lowercase letters together, except when called for by normal writing conventions, such as at the beginning of a sentence or a proper noun.

While designers tend to agree about the pitfalls of using all caps or mixed caps in body text, there’s less conformity when it comes to the practice of using caps in titles, headings, and display text, especially when designing for multimedia. The Web in particular demands bolder, larger type to help compensate for the low resolution of electronic media, the physical distance between people and the text, and the fatiguing nature of reading off a screen instead of paper. You may be tempted to believe that bigger is better and that caps are justified. All things being equal, though, readability is best served by minimizing the use of caps. All caps also has the stigma of connoting shouting and is considered by many people to be rude and unacceptable in online communication. You be the judge. Which of the following sentences do you think is easier to read?

Underline and Strikethrough

Underlining applies a line with the same color as the font to the baseline of selected text, while strikethrough adds a line through the horizontal center of type. Neither of these features provides control over stroke thickness or the placement of the line in relation to the text. Underlining text as a method of emphasis is considered taboo by design professionals: it disrupts the shape of the text by cutting through descenders. Like all caps, it makes text more difficult to read. Sometimes conventions have led designers to abandon key principles: for example, on the Web underlining text is a common and standard way of identifying hyperlinks. Readability is impaired, but usability is increased by giving people a visual cue to the clickable text on the page. However, there are many other ways to draw attention to hyperlinks without sacrificing readability. Many sites use code to hide the hyperlink underlines until a cursor moves over them. Using text graphics or visual icons is another way to avoid the unsightly underscores, but be sure to provide alternative text for users who have vision problems and may only hear text descriptions of your images.

Font Size

Digital fonts, whether used to create materials for print or for the screen, are measured in real physical units that correspond to their actual size when the text is printed on paper. But when fonts are displayed in an electronic medium, the actual size of text will vary according to the resolution (in pixels) of the monitor used to view it. You can set font size in several ways, but the point system is the most common method for measuring type. For print, it’s customary to set the font size to 10–12 points for body copy. Research and experience have shown these to be good point sizes for text documents when read by most people with normal vision. But just how big is 12-point font?

To begin with, a point is a unit of measurement used to define the vertical height of a typeface. Originally, point size referred to the vertical height of the metal block with the raised letterform. Regardless of a character’s shape and size, the block for each character in a typeface had the same height. An uppercase Z, though, naturally consumes more surface area on its metal block than does a lowercase i. And for both metal and digital type, point size reflects the distance from the top of the tallest ascender to the bottom of the lowest descender, plus a bit of additional space on either end. There are 12 points in a pica, and 6 picas in an inch. So there are 72 points in an inch. It’s worth mentioning that for many years, computer monitors were made with a native resolution of 72 ppi (pixels per inch). Does this mean that using a 72-point font will always lead to the production of letters that are exactly one inch tall? Well, no, not really. As long as fonts are limited to display purposes only on electronic screens (as opposed to printed out), the fact that points can be converted to inches really doesn’t matter. For the multimedia producer, it’s much easier to think of font size in relative rather than absolute terms. The readability of an impression made by different fonts set in the same point size can vary significantly in terms of their visual weight and impact. Even though different fonts of the same point size may use virtual blocks with the same height, one’s capital letters may be shorter within the block. Or another’s x-height may be greater, making it seem larger. Of course, some fonts, such as Georgia, may have wider letterforms too (see Figure 8.15).

When creating text in graphics software, always be sure to save it to a layer that is editable so you can resize or revise it later. In graphics software, type is initially created as a vector object, allowing it to be scaled to virtually any size without losing detail. Text can be resized with precision by entering or selecting a discrete point size. When a graphic is saved in a bitmap file format such as JPEG, the text elements within it are permanently rastorized, or changed to pixels rather than lines, and can no longer be edited with the type tools or resized without resulting in a loss of image quality and detail.

Figure 8.15 All five lines of type pictured here were set to a 12-point font size in Adobe Illustrator. However, the printed size of each line varies because of variables associated with the design of the each typeface being used. Note: The display size of the fonts shown here was enlarged for comparison.

Font Color

When selecting a font color, be sure to pick a contrasting shade that stands out from the background. Combining a dark-colored font with a dark background, or a light-colored font with a light background, leads to poor contrast and makes the text difficult to read (see Figure 8.16). Dark type on a light background is generally easier for people to read than light-colored type on a dark background. Even electronic books are normally created with black type on a white background.

When you do choose splashes of color, be careful about the combinations. Some color combinations, such as green and red, seem to vibrate, so they are hard to look at and strain users’ eyes. Also, some of your users may be colorblind or have color deficiencies. There are several kinds of problems that affect seeing color, and some color combinations are poor choices. For instance, a person may perceive all red as black, so the black-on-red website marquis you planned won’t work (unless you want the user to see a big black box). Whether you’re working on graphical text or web text, check your color choices with a tool such as Vischeck.com’s online colorblindness simulator.

Baseline Shift

When composing type in a word-processing or graphic design program, the software automatically conforms all the text in a row to a common baseline. Much of the time this works just fine. However, there are other times when the visual aesthetic can be best served by shifting the base of certain characters to a new position. This is particularly true when you attempt to combine different font families, styles, or sizes. You can shift the baseline to move text one point at a time above or below the existing baseline (see Figure 8.17).

Figure 8.16 The degree of contrast between the font color and background color can dramatically alter the readability of the text.

Source: Susan A. Youngblood.

Figure 8.17 Top: Typically, all type in a row of text sits uniformly on a common baseline. Bottom: Shifting the baseline is a creative choice by the designer for achieving a particular visual effect.

Superscript/Subscript

In order to accurately reflect the shorthand notation for special formulas and character symbols, it’s sometimes necessary to apply subscript or superscript formatting to text. Superscript characters have a smaller point size than the surrounding text and are shifted upward above the baseline. Ordinal numbers are often displayed with a superscript modifier (1^st, 2^nd, 3^rd, etc.). Other uses for superscript formatting include footnote references,¹ compass bearings (20° W), and mathematical exponents such as 10⁽²⁾ and (aⁿ)⁻¹. Subscript characters also have a smaller point size, but are shifted downward below the baseline as in H ₂ O, the chemical formula for water.

Anti-Aliasing

Because screen fonts are rendered out on screen using square pixels, the edges of the diagonal and curved strokes in a typeface often appear jagged. This stair-step effect is called aliasing and is an undesirable consequence of digital typography. Anti-aliasing is a technique used in raster (bitmap) editing to smooth out the edges of type. When anti-aliasing is turned on, transition pixels of an intermediate color are added between the jagged edges of a stroke and the surrounding area. The result is a distinctly smoother edge. Anti-aliasing works best on large type and is not generally recommended for font sizes smaller than 10 points because it reduces the readability of text.

Tech Talk

Font Management Font management software is used for previewing and managing the fonts on a computer system (see Figures 8.18 and 8.19). It can be used to install, remove, view, group, enable, and disable fonts. Fonts are loaded into RAM (random access memory) when your computer is first turned on. The more fonts that are installed, the more RAM your system will need to make those fonts available to running applications. Depending on how many fonts you have, your computer’s performance may be improved by temporarily disabling fonts you rarely use. A disabled font remains in the system but will not appear in the fonts list of your design software. As your collection of fonts grows, managing them will become increasingly important.

Figure 8.18 Suitcase Fusion is a cross-platform font management program that’s compatible with both Mac and Windows.

Figure 8.19 Font Book is Apple’s proprietary font manager utility for computers running OS X. The Baskerville font family is highlighted here as one of 415 resident fonts in the fonts collection.

Kerning and Tracking

By default, computer graphics programs handle letter spacing automatically according to the built-in design characteristics of each font family. But you often can improve the appearance and readability of text by manually controlling the amount of space between characters with kerning or tracking. Kerning selectively varies the amount of space between a single pair of letters; tracking uniformly adjusts letter spacing across a range of selected text. Each can improve the appearance and readability of text by eliminating distracting white space in a text design. They can also loosen up the appearance of type, making it appear less stuffy and congested. However, you need to be careful. Increasing the distance between letters makes the text more difficult to read.

Leading

Figure 8.20 The amount of leading you apply between lines affects readability. Which of these blocks of text is easier to read? Which is the most difficult to read? Why?

Leading (pronounced ledding) is used to define the amount of space between vertically adjacent lines of text (see Figure 8.20). The term originated during the days of manual typesetting when thin strips of lead of various widths were used to separate the rows of metal typeface. In digital typesetting, leading is measured in points as the distance between the baseline of one row and the baseline of the next. When lines are spaced too closely together or too far apart, readers have trouble advancing their eyes to the next line, and readability diminishes. The computer-generated spacing that’s assigned to type by the graphics program is not always appropriate and should never be blindly accepted. For example, large x-height fonts—such as most sans serifs—usually require additional leading. Extra leading is also needed for longer lines of text and for paragraphs set in boldface type.

Limit the Number of Typefaces

Most designers suggest limiting the number of typefaces in a design to two. While there are times when more typefaces might be justified, mixing too many typeface families in a design can make it look cluttered and unprofessional. When the need arises to combine typefaces in a design, be sure to choose ones that are totally different from one another. Rather than picking two similar serif typefaces, try combining a serif typeface with a sans serif typeface.

Text First, Type Second

While typeface can convey attitude, emotion, and personality, it’s the text that communicates ideas and information. Any time the message is overshadowed by the design, communication with your audience is disrupted. Remember, the best typography is often invisible and does not seek to be the star attraction. Designing type for maximum readability should always be your first priority.

Less Is More

There’s a popular adage in design circles that says, “Less is more.” With such an abundance of fonts, styles, and visual effects at your disposal, you may be tempted to throw everything in the pot, wave a magic wand, and see what comes out. Less is more suggests that the best styles and effects are often those that are subtle or moderated. You shouldn’t have to SHOUT to get people’s attention. At the right moment, a whisper can be even more effective. So as a final cautionary note, avoid going overboard with all the tools you now have at your disposal. The less is more principle implies that a simple and elegant design that communicates effectively is much more valuable than a visual-effects showpiece with no apparent focus or message.