Headline Line Breaks

Breaking up isn’t hard to do – just do it right so you don’t lose face. Learn why making the right line breaks in display type is essential for good looks and good sense.

Strizver, Ilene. Upper and lowercase Magazine (2008). Articles>Document Design>Typography>Usability

InDesign Shortcuts: Special Characters

The keyboard is rarely the friendliest path to symbols and special characters. Sometimes a bit of menu magic can guide you past the overwhelming Glyph palette. Indeed, the Special Character flyout palette in Adobe InDesign CS3 is a great shortcut to frequently-used characters and will spare your fingers the keyboard contortions.

Strizver, Ilene. Upper and lowercase Magazine (2008). Articles>Document Design>Typography>Adobe InDesign

Converting Text to Outline

Powerful design software makes many choices available to graphic designers, but just because you can do something doesn’t always mean you should. For example, sometimes it’s a good idea to convert your text layouts to outline, but sometimes it isn’t. Learn more about this occasionally necessary, often ill-advised practice before you decide whether or not it’s time to convert.

Strizver, Ilene. Upper and lowercase Magazine (2008). Articles>Document Design>Typography>Graphic Design

OpenType Numerals in InDesign and Quark

Today’s OpenType fonts come equipped with a virtual buffet of numeral styles, but all those choices can be a bit much for your design application to swallow. Here’s a practical guide to help you find your way through the maze of oldstyle, lining, proportional, and tabular, in both InDesign and Quark.

Strizver, Ilene. Upper and lowercase Magazine (2007). Articles>Document Design>Typography>Adobe InDesign

Tab Leaders

Does designing a table of contents drive you dotty? Next time, remember to say “take me to your tab leader.” Learning how to use your application’s automated tab leader function is a great way to save time and keep your layouts looking professional, down to the last detail.

Strizver, Ilene. Upper and lowercase Magazine (2007). Articles>Document Design>Typography>Adobe InDesign

Finessing Typographic Details: Positioning Punctuation

Are your characters depressed? When punctuation marks are positioned next to ALL CAPS, it can leave them looking a little low. Even making small adjustments in a character’s position will create greater visual balance and give your layout a “lift,” especially in display sizes.

Strizver, Ilene. Upper and lowercase Magazine (2007). Articles>Document Design>Typography

How to Match Type Size to Readership

The appropriate type size for a publication depends on many factors but there are some general type size guidelines to follow to insure readability for the main audience of your publication. These are not hard-and-fast rules. The more you know about your readership, the better type size choices you will make.

Bear, Jacci Howard. About.com. Articles>Document Design>Typography

Five Simple Steps to Better Typography: Measure the Measure

There is an optimum width for a Measure and that is defined by the amount of characters are in the line. A general good rule of thumb is 2-3 alphabets in length, or 52-78 characters (including spaces). This is for legibility purposes. Keep your Measure within these guidelines and you should have no problem with legibility. Please note that this figure will vary widely with research, this is just the figure I use and it seems to work well as a generally rule of thumb.

Boulton, Mark. Mark Boulton (2007). Articles>Document Design>Typography

Five Simple Steps to Better Typography: Hanging Punctuation

Hanging punctuation is an area of typographic design which has suffered at the hands of certain software products. It's a term which refers to glyph positioning to create the illusion of a uniform edge of text. It's most commonly used for pull-quotes, but I feel the most neglected is that of bulleted lists.

Boulton, Mark. Mark Boulton (2007). Articles>Document Design>Typography

A Strident Defense of Mediocre Formatting

Formatting automation removes cost from the process of creating and delivering content. For technical documents that change often and are perhaps delivered in multiple languages, it removes a lot of cost. Essentially, we can produce documents inexpensively and give more people access to them as a direct result of lower cost, or we can climb on our typographic high horse and whine about word spacing. I’m with the noisome fanboys.

O'Keefe, Sarah S. Scriptorium (2009). (Afrikaans) Articles>Document Design>Typography>Minimalism

Adobe FrameMaker: Refining the Type Size List

The sizes listed in the picture above are the default type sizes listed in FrameMaker's Paragraph and Character Designers. If your favorite choices are listed, great! If not, you have to type the size you want into the Size field. If you'd like to modify the Size list so that it includes your favorite Sizes, read on.

Binder, Barbara. Blogs.com (2009). Articles>Document Design>Typography>Adobe FrameMaker

Text Wrap and Text Formatting in InDesign

The most frequently asked questions I get from people who are new to InDesign revolves around Text Wrap; however, there are also questions about text formatting that don’t get asked. But I know they exist because when I’m presenting in front of an audience and I start formatting text, I can see the look of amazement on some folks’ faces as if they’re thinking, “Hey, I didn’t know you could do that!”

White, Terry. Layers Magazine (2009). Articles>Document Design>Typography>Adobe InDesign

Holding the Center

If you look through a poster session at a scientific conference, I’ll bet over 98% of their titles are centered at the top of their posters. Why? There is no advantage in reading. Most word processors and other publishing programs start with text left aligned by default, which implies that people deliberately center the text all the time.

Better Posters (2009). Design>Presentations>Document Design>Typography