9. Typography: The Basics

Typography  - Song Lyrics

The Basics of Typography

What Is Typography?
From a descriptive and simplistic point-of-view, typography is the arrangement of type.
Your choice of typefaces and your technique of setting type give your composition its character, pace and style.
A simple illustration of how influential typography can be is to look at the same text with different typefaces.
Notice how typography can define and alter the message:



Lines
A line of characters has at least five lines that it can be aligned to. These horizontal lines are guides for capital letters, ascenders, lowercase and descenders (we’ll discuss these terms shortly).
Here are the five lines:

Baseline: The one you might be most familiar with is the baseline. This is the line that the text sits on.
Cap height (or cap line): This marks the top of capital letters.
Ascender height (or topline): This line shows where the top of letters such as kand h touch. Strangely, in a lot of cases, this line is slightly higher than the capital line. It took me a while to get this into my head because, intuitively, you would think that capital letters would be the tallest characters.
X-height (or midline): This shows the height of lowercase letters (excluding ascenders and descenders). It is typically measured using the height of the letterx.
Descender height (or beardline): Descenders are the parts of characters that go below the baseline (such as the letters p and y). This line shows where the bottoms of the decenders are.



















Serif Fonts
Serif fonts are recognizable by the small lines at the ends of the various strokes of a character. As these lines make a typeface easier to read by guiding the eye from letter to letter and word to word, serif fonts are often used for large blocks of text, such as in a book. Times New Roman is an example of a common serif font.


Sans Serif Fonts
Serifs are small lines at the ends of character strokes. Sans serif, or without serif, refers to typefaces without these lines. Sans serif fonts are often used when a large typeface is necessary, such as in a magazine headline. Helvetica is a popular sans serif typeface. Sans serif fonts are also common for website text, as they can be easier to read on screen. Arial is a sans serif typeface that was designed specifically for on-screen use.



Baseline: The baseline is the invisible line on which characters sit. While the baseline may differ from typeface to typeface, it is consistent within a typeface. Rounded letters such as "e" will extend slightly below the baseline.


Intro to Adobe Fireworks
http://tv.adobe.com/watch/learn-fireworks-cs4/getting-started-01-understanding-fireworks/


Assignment:
Follow along with my instructions to create a cool typography image.