what is Typography ? and where is it uses ?

what is Typography?

Typography is an art of arranging letters in a way it is visually appealing to the reader still maintaining the essence and readability of the text. Typography is something that adds life to the text.

Is omnipresent. It is in the books we read, billboards, the websites we surf, even in our day-to-day life – packing material, street signs and even on the coffee mug we hold sipping our hot coffee to begin our day with.

Typography is practiced since the time human started writing, in old days, what played an important role was the color of the ink, and the type of paper used as it adds texture to the content. In the digital world, all our childhood cursive handwriting and calligraphy have been evolved with the help of software.

Importance 

• The attention of Readers: A good typography is one of the major reasonsfor more time spent on a particular website. We might not realize this on the surface, but deep down, our eyes are finding it appealing, that is why we are reading and surfing. Even in the advertisement, we remember the eye-catching type.

 

• Brand Building: More time spent on the website will gradually lead to the viewer associating the typeface with the brand. Good, unique, and consistent typography is the key to the success in terms of brand recognition.

Elements 

For good typography, we need to understand the basic elements as follows:

1. Typeface and Fonts

There is a fine line between typeface and font. A typeface is an entire family of fonts, best example Helvetica, whereas a font is a graphical representation of text character or we can say, member of typeface example Helvetica Regular or Helvetica Oblique. Every font has its own language, it is important to choose an appropriate font as per the content.

 

1. Size

All typefaces are not equal in size. They have different width and height. It is important to use readable size, also different sizes for the title and content to grab attention, to ensure the content does not look monotonous and to stress on a certain text.

1. Leading

Leading is the vertical space in the line of type. It is also known as line height or line spacing. Too much or too little spacing makes the content unpleasant to read.  For legible text,the thumb rule is leading value ranging from 1.25 and 1.5 times greater than the font size.

 

1. Kerning and Tracking

Kerning is the process of adjusting the space between individual characters. For example, a lower case ‘r’ if too close to the lower case ‘n’, it will collectively appear as a lower case’.

Whereas, Tracking is the process of adjusting the overall spacing of all characters.

 

1. Hierarchy

Hierarchy is used to emphasize important information. We discussed the font size, but color, spacing, and height also play an important role in standing out certain text.

 

1. White Space

Also known as ‘negative space’. It is the space around text or graphics. It holds aesthetic as well as readable value.

While focusing on good typography we should take care of consistency and avoid overdoing with our creativity. Understand the content and play around with elements wisely. The formulafor good typography is to make the text more effective.

-Sugandha Khurana