Typography 101: Terminology in Typography
Today’s blog will be covering terminology in typography. You’ll learn about the different terms that are commonly used in the typography world. Understand the fancy words so that you can create fancy type ☻!
Tracking / letter-spacing
Is the spacing added to or removed from groups of letters outside the original spacing and kerning specified within a font file. Letter-spacing is used to make optically-consistent adjustments to the visual density of a line or block of text.
Widows and orphans
A widowed line is a paragraph-ending line that falls at the beginning of the following page or column, thus appears separated from the rest of the text.
An orphan is a single word that appears by itself at the bottom of a paragraph or column, thus appears separated from the rest of the text.
Leading / linespacing
Vertical space between lines of text, from baseline to baseline. Leading can be used to enhance the legibility of a page or block of text.
Kerning
Adjustments to the space between pairs of letters, used to correct spacing problems in combinations like ‘VA’.
Small caps
Capitals which are a similar height to the lowercase or x-height, designed for abbreviation and emphasis in texts.
There’s a catch: when a larger block of text is in all caps, all letters have an identical height making every word an even rectangular shape, forcing us to read letter-by-letter, therefore reducing our reading speed.
Pica
The pica is a typographic unit of measure corresponding to 12 points or pixels.
Point
The point is a typographic unit of measure corresponding 1/12 of a pica or 1 pixel.
Point size
The size of the body of each character in a font. In print, the optimal point size for body text is 10–12 point. On the web, the optimal size is 15–25 pixels.
Hopefully you digested some helpful info here. Got questions? Leave them below ↓
I’ll join you all in the next instalment!
