The use of terms like leading, baseline, kerning, ascender, tail, and many others in type design can be intimidating to some people. The good news is that there are eight fundamental, universal elements of typographical design: typeface, hierarchy, contrast, consistency, alignment, white space, and color. Any design project can be completely transformed by even a fundamental comprehension of each of these components. Typographic principles are more than just some pretentious design student’s arbitrary aesthetic philosophies; rather, they are strategies that assist you in presenting your ideas to the audience and getting the most out of each word. Each of these aspects is addressed by a principle centered on effective communication. Any type of text-based communication, such as a website, blog post, magazine ad, interface, billboard, or newsletter, necessitates professional typography.
On the serif font, notice the red-circled tiny embellishments at the lines’ ends. Those are actually referred to as “serifs,” hence the category’s name. Since “sans” means “without,” all fonts without serifs are known as “sans-serif.” Decorative fonts are those that don’t really fit into either of those categories. They are often used for titles and are creative, elaborate fonts. When working on a design project, two fonts are frequently preferable to the maximum of three. It keeps your design simple and free of clutter. Try to pair serif fonts with sans-serif fonts, such as using a serif font for the body text and a sans-serif font for the title, or vice versa. Because they frequently have poor readability and simply won’t look right most of the time, use decorative fonts sparingly and almost never for main-body text. In order for readers to always be able to determine which category of information they are reading, one of the primary functions of hierarchy is to assist in organizing your thoughts. A typical illustration of this would be a website, whose main navigation pages are listed below the header in a smaller font while the site’s title is at the top of the page in a large header. This is a visual cue that, without the reader even noticing, helps them understand the context of the text. You’ll notice that the text on the website below is largely uniform in size, font, weight, and color. This is bad design because the text appears to be uniform and nothing stands out. Additionally, hierarchy aids in making your text “scannable.” Writers and designers must now, more than ever, strive to be concise and provide readers with the ability to consume large amounts of information quickly in the age of 140-character tweets and TL;DR (too long; didn’t read). Utilizing hierarchy to make your text scannable is one of the best methods for accomplishing this. For instance, if someone is reading a brochure for your bakery but is only interested in cupcakes, you want to make it easy for them to find that information. The types of baked goods should be organized with bold headers rather than making the reader read through large blocks of body text. This will allow the reader to quickly locate the relevant section without having to look further.
