Typography in ten minutes

This is a bold claim, but I stand be­hind it: if you learn and fol­low these five ty­pog­ra­phy rules, you will be a bet­ter ty­pog­ra­ph­er than 95% of pro­fes­sion­al writ­ers and 70% of pro­fes­sion­al de­sign­ers. (The rest of this book will raise you to the 99th per­centile in both categories.)
All it takes is ten min­utes—five min­utes to read these rules once, then five min­utes to read them again.

Ready? Go.

1. The ty­po­graph­ic qual­i­ty of your doc­u­ment is de­ter­mined large­ly by how the body text looks. Why? Be­cause there’s more body text than any­thing else. So start every project by mak­ing the body text look good, then wor­ry about the rest.
   In turn, the ap­pear­ance of the body text is de­ter­mined pri­mar­i­ly by these four ty­po­graph­ic choices:
2. point size is the size of the let­ters. In print, the most com­fort­able range for body text is 10–12 point. On the web, the range is 15–25 pix­els. Not every font ap­pears equal­ly large at a giv­en point size, so be pre­pared to ad­just as necessary.
3. line spac­ing is the ver­ti­cal dis­tance be­tween lines. It should be 120–145% of the point size. In word proces­sors, use the “Ex­act” line-spac­ing op­tion to achieve this. The de­fault sin­gle-line op­tion is too tight; the 1½-line op­tion is too loose. In CSS, use line-height.
4. line length is the hor­i­zon­tal width of the text block. Line length should be an av­er­age of 45–90 char­ac­ters per line (use your word-count func­tion) or 2–3 low­er­case al­pha­bets, like so:
   abcde­fghijklmnopqrstu­vwxyz­abcde­fghijklmnopqrstu­vwxyz­abcd
   In a print­ed doc­u­ment, this usu­al­ly means page mar­ginslarg­er than the tra­di­tion­al one inch. On a web page, it usu­al­ly means not al­low­ing the text to flow to the edges of the brows­erwindow.
5. And fi­nal­ly, font choice. The fastest, eas­i­est, and most vis­i­ble im­prove­ment you can make to your ty­pog­ra­phy is to ig­nore the fonts that came free with your com­put­er (known as sys­tem fonts) and buy a pro­fes­sion­al font (like my fonts eq­ui­tyand con­course, or oth­ers found in font rec­om­men­da­tions). A pro­fes­sion­al font gives you the ben­e­fit of a pro­fes­sion­al de­sign­er’s skills with­out hav­ing to hire one.
   If that’s im­pos­si­ble, you can still make good ty­pog­ra­phy with sys­tem fonts. But choose wise­ly. And nev­er choose times new ro­man or Ar­i­al, as those fonts are fa­vored only by the ap­a­thet­ic and slop­py. Not by ty­pog­ra­phers. Not by you.

That’s it. As you put these five rules to work, you’ll no­tice your doc­u­ments start­ing to look more like pro­fes­sion­al­ly pub­lished material.

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CPUT GD Alumni Featured: Gabrielle Guy

Book design is a kind of art in and of itself, and nowhere more so than in the case of art publication design. Here, the design choices and intricacies of the printing process itself impart meaning and create another experience for the reader between the book they hold in their hands and the artworks themselves.

Cape Town based graphic designer, Gabrielle Guy, specialises in the layout and design of art books, publications and custom monographs. She has worked with many of South Africa’s most renowned artist, galleries, curators and arts editors, and has developed a reputation for her careful attention to detail and considered approach. We spoke to Gabrielle to learn a little more about  her approach to this often overlooked but crucially important area of design.

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