Typography

The following are a series of typography definitions, like all my other vocabulary posts, none of the definitions are in my own words nor are the photos used my own work. Everything used in this post was found on the internet and the definitions are referenced at the end of each term.

Display Font: The main characteristic is that they’re unsuitable for body copy and are best reserved for headlines or other short copy that needs attention drawn to it. Display typefaces can be formal, or informal, and evoke any kind of mood. source

Drop Cap: a large capital letter used as a decorative element at the beginning of a paragraph or section. The size of a drop cap is usually two or more lines. source

Em Dash: used to make a break between parts of a sentence. Use it when a comma is too weak, but a colon, semicolon, or pair of parentheses is too strong. The em dash puts a nice pause in the text—and it is underused in professional writing.

En Dash:  which is shorter than an em-dash and longer than a hyphen, is used to indicate a range of values, such as a span of time or numerical quantities (similar to using the words “to” and “from”); for example, 9 AM – 5 PM, Monday – Friday or ages 5 – 8. source

Font family vs. Typeface: A typeface is the collective name of a family of related fonts (such as Times New Roman), while fonts refer to the weights, widths, and styles that constitute a typeface (such as Times New Roman Regular, Italic, Bold, etc.). Not all typefaces consist of multiple fonts however. source

Glyph: the specific shape, design, or representation of a character. source

Hierarchy: Type hierarchy organizes and gives order to the text elements in your design. Just as web designers and developers use header tags – h1, h2, h3 and so on – to organize the importance of text, visual hierarchy uses visual cues. In addition, type hierarchy helps readers scan text, reading bits of type faster in chunks that look alike. source

Justified Text: Paragraph or block of text in which all words in all lines are spaced-out such that the first word aligns with the left margin and last word with the right margin. Used commonly in books and magazines, it is not considered suitable for letters and other forms of personal communication. source

Kerning: refers to the spacing between the characters of a font. Without kerning, each character takes up a block of space and the next character is printed after it. source

Leading: describes the distance between each line of text. It is pronounced ledding (like “sledding” without the “s”). The name comes from a time when typesetting was done by hand and pieces of lead were used to separate the lines. source

Legibility: relates to the ability to distinguish one glyph from another when reading. source

Monospace: a typeface is which each character is given the same width (as by a typewriter). source

Orphans: a single word, part of a word or very short line, except it appears at the beginning of a column or a page. This results in poor horizontal alignment at the top of the column or page. source

Picas: a hair less than 1/6 inch, and contains 12 points. Picas are typically used to represent fixed horizontal measurements, most often column width. They are commonly used when designing newspapers, magazines, newsletters, and ads. Picas are designated with the letter p, such as 16p. source

Points: equal to 1/72 inch. To be extremely precise, 1 point is equal to .013836 inch, so 72 points are actually .996264 inch. For practical purposes, this is rounded up. Points are the measurement most commonly used in print to indicate the size of type, as well as the space between lines, referred to as line spacing or leading. In some instances, points are also used to measure the width and depth of a column. Points are routinely abbreviated as ‘pt’; typographers and typesetters have traditionally specified a given type setting as 12/16, to indicate 12 point type with 16 point leading. source

Serif / Sans Serif: A serif is a decorative stroke that finishes off the end of a letters stem (sometimes also called the “feet” of the letters). In turn,  a serif font is a font that has serifs, while a sans serif is a font that does not (hence the “sans”) source

Slab Serif: a type of serif typeface characterized by thick, block-like serifs. Serif terminals may be either blunt and angular (Rockwell), or rounded (Courier).  source

Small Caps: uppercase letterforms that are shorter in height than the capitals in a given typeface. When designed as part of a text face, they are most often the height of the lowercase (or very slightly taller), so that they harmonize with both the caps and the lowercase characters. source

Tracking: typographer’s term for letter-spacing. Sometimes confused with kerning (which is used to adjust spacing between individual letters), tracking adjusts the letter-spacing uniformly over a range of characters. Tracking affects the visual density of a word, phrase or paragraph. Decreasing the tracking makes the words appear more compact, while increasing tracking increases the amount of white space between letters and words, creating a more airy effect. source

Widows: a lone word or short group of words that appears at the bottom of a paragraph, column or page. They tend to make long sections of text look unbalanced and messy, as well as leaving too much excess white space at the end of a page. source