Typography - concepts Flashcards
What is a typeface?
A typeface is a collection of letters. While each letter is unique, certain shapes are shared across letters. A typeface represents shared patterns across a collection of letters.
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What are the differences between a typeface and a font?
A typeface is the underlying visual design that can exist in many different typesetting technologies, and a font is one of these implementations.
In other words, a typeface is what you see and a font is what you use.
Source fonts.google.com
What is a point size or pt
A point is a unit of measurement for type and has been employed for hundreds of years. On the web, we tend to think of pixels, but in print design, points remain the standard unit of measuring font size.
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What is a baseline?
What does cap height refers to?
Cap height refers to the height of a typeface’s flat capital letters (such as M or I) measured from the baseline.
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What does X-height refers to?
X-height refers to the height of the lowercase x for a typeface, and it indicates how tall or short each glyph in a typeface will be.
Typefaces with tall x-heights have better legibility at small font sizes.
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What are ascenders and descenders?
Ascenders are an upward vertical stroke found in certain lowercase letters that extend beyond either the cap height or baseline.
Descenders are the downward vertical stroke in these letters. In some cases, a collision between these strokes can occur when the line height (the vertical distance between baselines) is too tight.
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What is weight in typography?
Weight refers to the relative thickness of a font’s stroke. A typeface can come in many weights; and four to six weights is a typical number available for a typeface.
Common weights:
1. Light
2. Regular
3. Medium
4. Bold
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what is readability?
Readability refers to how easy it is to read words or blocks of text, which is affected by the style of a typeface.
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What is letter-spacing?
Letter-spacing, also called tracking, refers to the uniform adjustment of the space between letters in a piece of text.
For smaller type sizes, looser letter spacing can improve readability as more space between letters increases contrast between each letter shape.
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What are tabular-figures good for?
Use tabular figures (also known as monospaced numbers), rather than proportional digits, in tables or places where values may change often.
Tabular figures keep values optically aligned for better scanning.
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What are the recommended line lengths?
Line lengths for body text are usually between 40 to 60 characters. In areas with wider line lengths, such as desktop, longer lines that contain up to 120 characters will need an increased line height from 20sp to 24sp.
The ideal line length is 40-60 characters per line for English body text.
The ideal line length for short lines of English text is 20-40 characters per line.
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What is a line height?
Line height, also known as leading, controls the amount of space between baselines in a block of text. A text’s line height is proportional to its type size.
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What value should we use for Paragraph spacing?
Keep paragraph spacing in the range between .75x and 1.25x of the type size.
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What are the 3 types of alignments?
- Left-aligned: when text is aligned to the left margin
- Right-aligned: when text is aligned to the right margin
- Centered: when text is aligned to the center of the area it is set in
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