A Brief Look at Typography Lesson

Typography plays a double role as both verbal and visual communication. It helps the reader understand the form and content of the page. Good typography helps readers understand the relation between the pictures and the text. The rules of typography are similar for webpages and for print documents, but the appearance of type on the screen is substantially different when compared to type on paper.

The typography should be consistent throughout a site. The consistency lends polish to a site which will encourage visitors to remain on the site. You should decide on font settings, paragraph spacing, size of headers and sub-headings, and create a written style guide that will help you maintain consistency as you design and develop the website. This is especially important when you are dealing with a large website that may have hundreds of pages.

The typography quality of a digital product is determined by how the body copy appears on the page. Usually, there is more text on the page than anything else so you should begin each project by making the body copy look good. There are four typography features that affect the appearance of text: point size, line spacing, line length, and font choice.

Point size is the size of letters. In printed material, the common size for text is 10 or 12 point. On the web, the common range is 15 to 25 pixels. However, fonts are not the same size at a given point size so you may have to adjust the sizes as necessary.

Line spacing is defined as the vertical distance between lines. Usually, the line spacing should be 120% to 145% of the point size.

Line length is the horizontal width of a text block. The line length should be an average of 45 to 90 characters per line. In printed media, this means the page margins will probably be larger than the traditional one-inch. On a webpage, this means that web content should not flow to the edges of the browser window.

Font choice is the easiest, fastest and most visible typographical improvement that you can make to a page. Use a professional font to convey a professional attitude.

This is a brief overview of typography and we will visit the topic in more detail in an upcoming module. The concepts covered are ones that you should be familiar with before you begin writing text for your website.

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