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4.3: Typography

  • Page ID
    50701
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    Typography

    Having looked at layout, we need to next cover the subject of typography in document design. Typography is a massive subject, one that we could spend an entire semester on and still find ourselves lacking by some metrics. For our purposes, we will look at how typography impacts our work as technical writers and investigate the choices that we have at the level of typography to tweak the appearance of our texts and their impact. We’ll discuss fonts and font families; the attributes of these fonts and how they impact our texts; choices of kerning, tracking, and leading; and font availability.

    In general, I think we find ourselves in a world that is more aware of fonts and font choices than previous generations. We have entire documentaries available on the font Helvetica. We have folks that will instantly turn their noses at the usage of Papyrus or Comic Sans. Fonts and their names and impact are a bit more on our minds in popular culture, but these issues I’ve hit on only scratch the surface of what a font is and how we can view it.

    For one, if we’re going to be traditionalists, we should distinguish between a font and a typeface. Generally speaking, when we discuss fonts, we’re really discussing typefaces. Typefaces are the full collections of the fonts of a particular family that share a common design. You may not realize it, but each particular variation of a font is often designed by a designer creating a typeface. There are separate variations for regular, italic, bold, and small caps, just to name a few. These variations are designed by the font’s creator to maintain the font’s aesthetic and legibility throughout. With that said, not all fonts have these options, or more correctly, not all typefaces have fonts with all of these variations. In those cases you may simply not have the option to bold or italicize or small caps your font—you’re running into limits in what designer intended. Now, some programs will override this distinction and give you italics and bolding and small caps where none exists, but those options are usually less aesthetically pleasing and more likely to clash with the rest of the typeface.

    Going beyond the distinction between typefaces and fonts, we could go into different traditions of fonts and font designs. Suffice it to say that we can see fonts in a couple of ways. Some fonts are historically designed and oriented—they are recreations of classic fonts that were used in a particular era by a particular printer or artist. In the case of book printing, the font may be based on a typeface that was used by a particular printer. In the case of comics or other visual texts, the font may be based on a particular lettering style. On the opposite end of the spectrum are novel fonts, fonts that are created by their designer within particular traditions but without a direct one-to-one historical target. We could go even further down this rabbit hole, but for our purposes this amount of awareness should work for us.


    This page titled 4.3: Typography is shared under a CC BY-SA license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Adam Rex Pope.

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