text, fonts, and typography

I haven’t been posting here much, as you may have noticed. See, I’ve wanted to do a large, combined post on good fonts and how to use them. The project seemed to get bigger and bigger as I added more fonts; it got to where just the thought of the project made me not want to write.

That’s why I’m starting a new series entitled “Text, Fonts, and Typography”. It’ll be somewhere in the neighborhood of a dozen posts (possibly more), and it will talk about typography and fonts, mostly. It may also include some things about text, and by text I mean altering writing to fit your typography.

Communication is an art

Well, at least it should be. A lot of people write papers, blog posts, or other things and only focus on one aspect. The trouble is that there are many aspects to communication (written or otherwise). When you’re speaking you need to take into account things like your tempo, volume, pitch, and more. Otherwise people will find it harder to listen to you. As you get more into speaking you learn to modify your speech to fit what you’re talking about. That’s what makes people really tune in, because you sound like you care what you’re talking about.

Written communication is the same way. I’m by no means a writer, but I do know a little bit about it. It’s important that you work on not only the words and sentence structure you use, but also how it looks. Many good papers have been ruined because the author chose to use his “favorite font” (usually Comic Sans or something equally as overused). Picking the wrong font (or using a good one poorly) can cause a college-level science essay to look like a 3rd graders book report.

Here we go!

Don’t worry. This is exactly the problem I plan on addressing. We’ll talk about things like serif vs sans-serif, line-height, kerning, tracking, headers, body text, and more. I’m hoping not only to teach you things as we go, but also to learn myself. Stay tuned for more!