During our second week, we not only covered The History of Typography and the Five Families of Type, but  we also were introduced to Typographical Anatomy.

  • If you missed the lecture on the History of Typography and the Five Families of Typography, you can download the slides here.
  • We learned the parts of type of similar to our body parts. Download the Type Anatomy sheet and keep it handy to help you identify the different parts of letters.
  • We watched several videos in class:

Typography tutorial: Anatomy: Parts and shapes of type

  • We learned about the Five Families of Type, and the characteristics that distinguish them. The following videos will help you with this process.

Type Anatomy and Terminology

 

Type Classification/Families of Type

 

How to Identify Old Style Fonts

 

How to Identify Transitional fonts

 

How to Identify Modern fonts

 

How to Identify Slab Serif fonts

 

Tracking, Kerning, and Leading

We covered three main topics that deal with spacing—tracking, kerning and leading. It is important to understand the difference between tracking and kerning.

  • Tracking deals with the adjustment of letter-space which will affect entire lines or blocks of text. By adding tracking, the letter-spacing, which is the amount of space between the characters, will be increased or decreased. The goal is to have consistently even space between all the characters
  • Kerning is often confused with tracking but kerning deals with the letter-space adjustments between a specific pair of letters. You only have to be concerned about kerning display or headline text. Certain letter pairs don’t fit well together, so the designer’s goal is to adjust the space so that letter-spacing looks consistent.
  • Leading is the amount of space between lines of text. It is measured from baseline to baseline. It is important that line-spacing is not too tight or too far apart.
  • All three of these—tracking, kerning, and leading—are important to the overall look and to make reading easier.

 

Kerning and Kerning Pairs

 

Kerning vs Tracking

 

27 Design Principles – Typography, Leading