#20409
Accents and Accented Characters
Have you ever needed to set an accented character in copy but couldn’t find it on your keyboard? If these characters leave you feeling naïve, you’re not alone. Diacritic characters, as these accented letters are called, are essential to the proper pronunciation and meaning of many foreign words. When you come across an accented letter, don’t assume it can be eliminated without consequence, or you might end up misspelling a person’s name! Accent marks also turn up frequently in foreign-born words and phrases that have become part of common English usage, such as résumé, passé and tête-à-tête. Happily, diacritic characters can be accessed or created with most professional-quality fonts.
Strizver, Ilene. Upper and lowercase Magazine (2003). Design>Typography
#20430
How do you tell one typeface from another? If you’re trying to distinguish Helvetica from Times Roman, the difference is obvious. In other cases, however–especially between text designs having similar characteristics–the differences can be subtle and difficult for the less–experienced eye to see. One important step in training your eye to notice the details that set one design apart from another is to examine the anatomy of the characters that make up our alphabet.
Strizver, Ilene. Upper and lowercase Magazine (2001). Design>Typography
#20413
What kind of a bullet doesn’t travel at high speeds and is completely non-violent? A typographer’s bullet, of course! This very useful typographic element can add emphasis, clarity and visual interest to all kinds of copy. Simply put, a bullet is a large dot used to draw attention to each item in a list or series. The items can be single words, phrases, sentences or paragraphs. Even if you use the bullet that is part of your font, don’t automatically assume it’s the right size: it might need to be altered in scale or position to make it look balanced next to the text.
Strizver, Ilene. Upper and lowercase Magazine (2003). Design>Typography
#20425
Calligraphic fonts resemble elegant handwriting. They often look as if they were drawn with flat-tipped pens or brushes; occasionally, they even include the drips, spots, blotches and irregularities characteristic of hand-drawn letters.
Strizver, Ilene. Upper and lowercase Magazine (2002). Design>Typography
#20433
Indenting the first line of every paragraph is a habit most of us acquired in grammar school. However, for those daring souls who have always insisted on coloring outside the lines, it’s time to consider using a different style paragraph indent. There are more options than you might have realized!
Strizver, Ilene. Upper and lowercase Magazine (2001). Design>Typography>Style Guides>Grammar
#20411
Setting type means selecting and arranging groups of characters, but not all of those characters have to be part of the alphabet. Dingbats are non-typographic elements that can enhance your work by adding variety and functionality.
Strizver, Ilene. Upper and lowercase Magazine (2003). Design>Typography>Document Design
#26388
For Your (Typographic) Information: Initial Letters
The first in a series on typographic know-how by Ilene Strivener. Want to get your text off to a great start? Try initial letters.
Strizver, Ilene. AIGA (2004). Design>Typography
#20410
Can you find the fractions on your keyboard? If not, you’re not alone. Believe it or not, there are no designated keystrokes for fractions on a Mac. PCs offer a few (1/4, 1/2, 3/4), but they’re so well-hidden most users can’t find them anyway. Yet fractions appear fairly often in copy, so what’s a person to do? It’s too frustrating by half!
Strizver, Ilene. Upper and lowercase Magazine (2003). Design>Typography>Document Design
#20423
If you love the convenience of creating and printing documents from your computer, but miss the informal, personal touch of handwriting, here’s a handy idea: try a handwriting font.
Strizver, Ilene. Upper and lowercase Magazine (2002). Design>Typography
#20417
Help, I’m Lost in a Sea of Typefaces! (Part 1)
Decisions, decisions, decisions! One of the most challenging aspects of any design project is choosing the typefaces. There are now more than forty thousand fonts on the market and that number is growing daily, which makes the search for the “perfect” typeface only slightly more daunting than looking for that proverbial needle in a haystack. With a little planning, however, you’ll find that selecting appropriate typefaces is far more manageable than it appears.
Strizver, Ilene. Upper and lowercase Magazine (2002). Design>Typography>Fonts
#20418
Help, I’m Lost in a Sea of Typefaces! (Part 2)
Decisions, decisions, decisions! One of the most challenging aspects of any design project is choosing the typefaces. There are now more than forty thousand fonts on the market and that number is growing daily, which makes the search for the “perfect” typeface only slightly more daunting than looking for that proverbial needle in a haystack. With a little planning, however, you’ll find that selecting appropriate typefaces is far more manageable than it appears.
Strizver, Ilene. Upper and lowercase Magazine (2002). Design>Typography
#20420
Hyphens, En-Dashes and Em-Dashes
Hyphens, en-dashes and em-dashes are frequently used punctuation marks that are just as frequently misunderstood. All three marks are essentially horizontal lines, though their lengths vary (as do, occasionally, their designs – see figure 1). However, these three different marks have very different purposes, and using a hyphen to do an m-dash’s job is just as much of a punctuation error as using a question mark in place of a comma.
Strizver, Ilene. Upper and lowercase Magazine (2002). Design>Typography>Grammar
#20406
What kind of font is best savored one letter at a time? If you guessed an initial font, you’re correct. Often overlooked yet extremely useful, initial fonts are collections of ornamental letters that are designed for individual use. The characters in an initial font are usually too decorative to be legible if set as complete words or sentences, but they’re perfect for setting a single eye-catching letter at the beginning of a sentence, paragraph, article, or chapter.
Strizver, Ilene. Upper and lowercase Magazine (2003). Design>Typography
#25174
Have a lot of text to set and want to spice it up? Try using an initial letter.
Strizver, Ilene. Design, Typography and Graphics (2004). Design>Typography
#20434
Want to get your text off to a great start? Try using initial letters. An initial letter (or initial cap, as they are also called) is an enlarged letter that is used as the first character of a paragraph. It can sit above, below, to the left of, or even behind the body text, and can be set in a contrasting weight, style or color.
Strizver, Ilene. Upper and lowercase Magazine (2001). Design>Typography
#20431
When it’s time to emphasize a word or phrase, do you automatically reach for the font style menu? Boldface and italics are two of the most common techniques for lending emphasis to text, but these basic typographic tools are often used incorrectly. Here’s how the pros handle text that needs to stand out from the crowd.
Strizver, Ilene. Upper and lowercase Magazine (2001). Design>Typography
#20432
We’ve all seen newspapers, books, magazine articles and ads which use justified type; that is, type that is flush on both the left and right margins. Used well, justified type can look clean and classy. When it’s carelessly set, however, justified type can make your text look distorted and hard to read. Proper justification is a tricky technique to master, but it’s well worth the effort if high quality, professional-looking typography is your goal.
Strizver, Ilene. Upper and lowercase Magazine (2001). Design>Typography
#20407
If you’ve ever gone looking 'behind the scenes' in your fonts, you might have stumbled upon a wonderful surprise: a logotype. Logotypes are usually small, commonly used words – such as the, for, and, of and to – that are designed as a unit. Like ligatures, logotypes are treated as a single character by your application (and are usually accessed with one keystroke or keystroke combination). Unlike ligatures, the letters within a logotype are not necessarily connected. In fact, the sky’s the limit when it comes to the design of these useful little words.
Strizver, Ilene. Upper and lowercase Magazine (2003). Design>Typography>Graphic Design
#29317
Do you have questions about mixing font formats in one file, crossing platforms, automating old-style figures, the best apps for OpenType, and the fonts with the most bang for the buck?
Strizver, Ilene. Creative Pro (2007). Design>Typography>Standards
#20422
Rags, widows and orphans – sounds more like a Dickens novel than type! In spite of their odd names, these concepts are important to understand if good typography is your goal.
Strizver, Ilene. Upper and lowercase Magazine (2002). Design>Typography
#20421
Register, Trademark and Copyright Symbols
Register, trademark and copyright symbols are important communicators. They help establish brand identities and protect creative work from theft or plagiarism. Despite their legal and symbolic power, these symbols need to speak softly, typographically speaking. Their tasteful and appropriate use is a small but significant part of good typography.
Strizver, Ilene. Upper and lowercase Magazine (2002). Articles>Intellectual Property>Trademark>Typography
#20419
One of the most irritating typographic faux pas is the use of straight quotation marks (also called ‘dumb’ quotes) instead of true typographic quotation marks (‘smart’ or ‘curly’ quotes). How did this dumb-versus-smart muddle begin? Blame the engineers: the standard keyboard layout (which was not created by typographers!) has straight quotes in place of real quotes. As designers, it’s our job to use our ‘smarts’ to work around this all-too-common problem.
Strizver, Ilene. Upper and lowercase Magazine (2002). Design>Typography>Document Design
#26385
What makes a typeface look the way it does? The design of the letter shapes is a primary factor, but it’s by no means the only one...
Strizver, Ilene. AIGA (2004). Design>Typography
#20428
What makes a typeface look the way it does? The design of the letter shapes is a primary factor, but it’s by no means the only one. The spacing of a font has a large impact on how it looks when set, and should be a consideration when choosing and using a typeface.
Strizver, Ilene. Upper and lowercase Magazine (2001). Design>Typography
#20427
If the letter spacing and kerning of a font you love is less than perfect, there’s hope: today’s design programs have advanced type manipulation features that allow you to improve the way any font looks 'out of the box.'
Strizver, Ilene. Upper and lowercase Magazine (2001). Design>Typography
