Designing With Type: Typography Basics for Non-Designers

1. Introduction: Welcome to this class, Designing with Type, Typography for Non-Designers. Where I'll be walking you through a few of my tips and tricks for how to use type and typefaces. We will be talking about the emotion behind a typeface. How to lay out text. You can get your viewer engaged to read more, and some tips on how to work with body copy, so it's easy for people to read and digest. This class is aimed specifically at non-designers. This is for people who use type for presentations or social media graphics, but they haven't had any training in typography. By the end of this short course, you will feel more confident using type, and how to use it effectively to communicate the right message to your audience. Hello. I'm Faye Brown, and I've been teaching on Skillshare since 2012. I'm a graphic design and branding specialist based in the UK. I'm a big typography geek who could talk about typefaces all day long. However, in this class, I'll be condensing this down into a short snappy 20-minute class that will give you the know-how to use typography more effectively, so let's dive in. 2. What Is Typography?: What is typography? Put simply, typography is the art of arranging or designing letter forms. I like to describe typography as your visual voice, although really that's not what a lot of graphic design is. It's communicating a message without having to speak. We take it all in visually. Having a knowledge of a few typography tips and tricks is a really useful tool to have. I really became fascinated by typography when I did my graphic design degree course. It's a really big area to cover. Today we're going to mainly focus on typefaces and how each can have their own personality. As we go along, I'll introduce you to some typographic terms and a few tips on how to layout blocks of text that's interesting for the reader to follow. There are a number of projects you can choose from for this class. You can choose one or all of them if you like. The first one will be to go on an alphabet hunt. You can take a camera out and about and search for every letter of the alphabet, ideally all different styles too. Here's one I did on a recent break to London. This project really helps you realize all the different styles of typefaces. As you go think about what styles are being used for what and how do those type faces make you feel? Maybe it's a shop. Does the typeface make it look expensive or more budget friendly? Does it make it look serious or fun? Does the typeface look approachable or maybe a little bit scary? Is the typeface easy to read? Alternatively, maybe you fancy doing this project on a rainy day, so you could use magazines instead to find all the letters of the alphabet. Try to use different magazines and see how they're using typefaces in different ways depending on the subject matter. My son's Minecraft magazine uses very different typefaces to ideal Home Magazine, for example. Just think about all of this as you collect your letters. An alternative to this is to pick one letter, maybe it's the first letter of your name and try to find as many different examples of that letter as possible. This might be harder depending on your name. Here is an example of some F's I found on pinterest.com. But it's more fun if you can get out and about all look through magazines. If you can find a mix of uppercase and lowercase letters, that would be good. Uppercase letters are capital letters. They are called uppercase as back in the days of using metal type, the capital letters would be kept in the top drawer. Just in case you ever wondered why they were called uppercase. By picking one letter, it helps you see all the varying ways these letters can be drawn, even though the basic shapes will be the same. Also included in the class resources is a PDF of alphabets and numbers of all different styles. You'll find this in the resources tab. If you have tracing paper or a thin piece of white paper, have a go at drawing over these letters. It's a really good way to understand letter forms and different styles of typefaces. Also those a little bit more confident in drawing, try redrawing them without tracing. Those are your projects. I'll keep coming back to those, but now let's talk in more depth about how typefaces can have their own personality and how the typeface you choose can change the way you read a word. 3. Choosing Typefaces: Choosing the right typeface. Can a typeface really evoke an emotion? Let's take a look. I like to use the word love and school for this exercise. Let's start with love. Here's four different typefaces illustrating exactly the same word. How does each one make you feel? Color can also play a big part in visual design, but I'm purposely not including color in these options, it's purely based on the typeface. Pause the video if you like, and make some mental notes on how these typefaces might help illustrate different forms of love. I think the top left, is very friendly love. It's quite classic. It's a little bit weddingy, if that's a word. It's an easy flowing love. The top right is somewhat different. It looks a bit scary, tough love. I can imagine this on an album cover by a rock band,. The bottom-left love is fairly modern, it's very confident and bold. Then a soft way with the curved edges and roundness to some of the shapes and forms. The bottom right love looks very innocent and childlike. It's the love a toddler might have for their favorite teddy bear. Now whether or not you saw these words in exactly the same way as me or not, doesn't matter, but I expect there were similarities between our thinking. You probably wouldn't see the top right one on too many wedding invitations. Just by choosing different typefaces, we can shape how the reader might relate to the word. Let's look at the word school, which is not such an emotional word. Again, pause the video and have a think about how you relate to these options. What do you think each school might be like? The top left one for me, looks very traditional and proper. I'd expect the school to be well-established, serious in its approach to education. The top right one looks more fun. Maybe this would be good for dance school. The bottom left one, this one reminds me of an American sports college, I'm getting vibes of it being very sporty school. The bottom right looks like maybe a stage school, something quite loud, and unexciting. You can do this exercise with your name too. Let's say I was designing a logo for someone called Charlie Hooper. We don't know what gender Charlie is, we don't know what Charlie does, but just by looking at these typefaces, we might start to form ideas in our head of what Charlie does. You can have a go at finding a typeface for yourself. There's a great website called Font Squirrel, which is full of free typefaces. You can click on some of the terms here as a starting point and then click on Test Drive where you can type in your name and see how it looks. Think about your personality. Does it feel right for you? This one is probably a bit too fancy for me, as an example. I liked that it's quite friendly and bold, but a little flourishes it has and maybe a bit too much and it's actually quite hard to read. Another great website to look for typefaces is creativemarket.com. You can search for fonts, and if you click on a bundle, you can again test drive them all at once. These ones do cost money, but it's still quite a fun exercise to do. This helps me compare them easily and see what might be best for me. This was from a modern bundle, but you might want to go for something much more decorative and funky like this one. Just think about your personality and what style might suit you. This is basically the process that I go through when I'm designing logos. Thinking about the personality of the letters and how they reflect the business or person that I'm designing for. Have a go for yourself. What will help you get started with this is knowing a little bit about type classifications from service to self service to script and handwriting fonts. We will now take a look at a few of those to help you with your searches. 4. Type Classifications: Serif. A Serif font has small strokes at the end of the characters. Serifs are usually associated with more traditional typefaces such as Times and Garamond but many of the more modern typefaces use Serifs, whether that's bracketed like Garamond here or slab Serif like Rockwell or a wedge Serif like Birch. Many books are written using traditional Serif fonts like Garamond. The serous help form a link between each of the letters, which in turn helps the reader's eye flow across a line or a paragraph of type. The more traditional Serif typefaces can help something look quite businesslike, trustworthy, and established, but they can also give off a vibe of being a little bit boring. Sans Serif. Sans Serif is simply a typeface without Serifs, sans, meaning without. The most famous Sans Serif typeface is perhaps Helvetica, as seen here on the New York Subway. A simple typeface family like this body copy which is in Montserrat is easy to read, and it aids readability for the reader. We often see Sans Serif typefaces use on websites, although Serifs are making a bit of a comeback. Sans Serif typefaces in general will communicate a bit more of a modern approach to the business, friendly, and accessible. If you are aiming at a younger market, you might opt for a Sans Serif style. All typefaces generally fit into being a Serif or Sans Serif but then there are other styles in terms to consider. Script-style typefaces were developed in the 17th century based on writing techniques using pen and ink. Since those days other script styles have developed and became very popular. Script styles can really range in their messaging from formal and elegant to heavy black letter that's edgy and loud. Comic book styles can be fun depending on the usage. Try to avoid Comic Sans. Comic Sans has been used, overused and also used for inappropriate things like warning signs. There's a warning sign in our town about being electrocuted and it's in Comic Sans. It's got a bit of a bad reputation amongst designers. Although apparently, it is one of the easiest typefaces for children to read. Decorative typefaces take in a lot of styles from ones like Budmo Jiggler and Rosewood, they would only be used to really grab attention, so headings, posters, possibly logos in the right way. Decorative can also take in styles of scripts too. Typewriter styles like this one are pretty self-explanatory. This style can work really well for dictionary definition style designs. Stencil styles are typically typefaces that have breaks in the letter forms. They are often used for army-style references and also top secret documents. Display many previous styles we've spoken about would come under this category but when doing font searches, this category would show up options that are great for larger text, so headings and posters, somewhere work for logos as well. Handwritten. These can also fit into script because of the style, but handwritten typefaces are very popular and can add a friendly personable feel to the text. It's not just the typeface alone that can help with communicating a message. Using size and weight can also be used very effectively. Let's take a look in the next video. 5. Size and Weight: Size and weight. The next slides you will see are often the same sans-serif family called Gotham. Within that family, we have thin weight right through to ultra. The letter shapes are based on the same shapes, but the weight make them look very different. If we want to create a feeling of calm and quiet, a thinner weight might work better, but if we want to shout about something or alert people to possible danger, a heavy bold weight will grab people's attention quicker. We can also use size to help us with our messaging here. We can whisper or we can shout. Let's look at how this can be used in something called typographic hierarchy. This is when we want to invite the reader in and let that I follow the information to eventually read, maybe like a full article. Let's take this as a brief example. Let's say you saw these two squares pop up on social media or a website, which one are you most likely to read? The one on the right invites you in. It gives you an idea of what the rest of the paragraph might talk about in digestible chunks of information. Let's look at how magazine designers do this within layout design. We see the headline. It's the biggest text on the page. We see the subheading, which is the probably the second biggest text on the page. We also have a pullout fact which you'll probably read after the subheading. By this point, you probably know if you want to read the whole article, the rest of the text is called body copy. Our eye skirted over the key information very quickly, thanks to the way the text has been laid out. When it comes to layouts like this, we wanted to make sure the text is easy to read. Some type faces are actually quite hard to read, although you can get away with them at bigger sizes. This typeface friendship is quite fun. As a header typeface, it would work well on a poster. It looks friendly and quirky. It's also bold and easy to read. However, if we then use the same typeface for a block of body copy, suddenly becomes a lot more difficult to digest. It would probably give me a headache if I read a whole paragraph written in this typeface. Why is that? Let's take a look at body copy and a few tips for making lots of texts easy to read. First up, we might choose a fairly simple serif or sans-serif typeface, nothing with too much character as this will make it harder to read. Save those typefaces for headings. Let's choose Georgia. I have set this at 9 points size, which is generally a good size for body copy. There's a few things that we can do now to make this easier for the reader. First step, this is a big block of text with very long lines. It's actually quite hard for the eye to read a line of text this long. Let's split this into two columns. You'll see this in magazines a lot. There will very rarely be long lines of text. Between 10-15 words on a line is usually a good amount, or 60-70 characters. By characters I mean the letters, the punctuation, numbers, etc. The other thing we can look at is the space between each of the lines. This is called leading. These lines are fairly close together and they make the text look quite clumped. There's not much whitespace around the lines to rest the eye. See what happens when I change the second columns line spacing, suddenly looks a little bit easier to read. Although if we push it too far, it can mean that I find it hard to meet backup with the start of the next line. It's getting that happy balance. I was always told if you have a type size point around nine points, generally, a good line spacing would be 3-4 points above that, so 12-13 points. This will depend on the program you're using to how easy it would be to see those values. I use Adobe Illustrator a lot, but that's an expensive program. On Canva, you don't have as much control over line spacing, so then you are trusting your eye. Hopefully these little pointers have helped with what to look out for. 6. Kerning: There are many typographic terms I could talk about, but it's quite a lot to take in, and really it's something to explore more if you get into graphic design in more depth. But one more term I would like to introduce you to is kerning. Kerning is the space between letters. Once you know about kerning, you'll start spotting bad kerning everywhere. Let's take the word start. Generally, most typefaces have preset kerning when you use them on a computer. But sometimes the free ones might not be great and you need to adjust the kerning yourself. I might want to bring that A closer to the T as there is a bit of a gap. I'm worried that if this was a big word on a poster, that gap might make the readability harder. Maybe it will look like st art instead of start. You can use letter spacing to our advantage if we want to add messaging to a word. For fast, I might close up letter spacing. Also, I might make it italic so it looks like it's going forward. For slow, I might widen that space so the word is read slower. If you are designing a poster, I wouldn't suggest you start messing around the letter spacing of each word as it will then start looking messy and inconsistent. But kerning is a good term to know about when it comes to typography. 7. Your Projects: So let's look back on those projects. Now you know a lot more about typefaces, the emotion a typeface can convey, and the different classifications of typefaces. Go out and explore and see how many you can find. Make a mental note of what typefaces have been used for what? Do they help get the message across? Or would a better style typeface work better? Build your alphabets from photos or cut out of magazines and have fun really getting to know letterforms better. Then why not have a go at creating your own typeface? You can use a site like calligraphr.com who do have a sign-up, although you can get started for free. Then you can print the form out and fill it in with your own letters. You can simply hand draw your own letters. Think about the letter shapes when you do this, some letters might take a few goes to perfect. You could use Lego, paper cutouts, pasta blocks, potato print stamps, stones, ribbons, coins. Maybe use your initials to come up with some creative ways of making letters. But mostly just have a little bit fun. 8. Conclusion: That's your introduction to typography. I have two other classes on this subject, The Art of Topography. It was my first ever Skillshare class that goes into this area in a lot more depth. Choosing the right typefaces explores that area a little bit further too. I can't wait to see your projects as I love typography and I would love to see your alphabets from all around the world. If you'd like to join my dedicated Facebook group and to my Skillshare students, then please do. I'll pop a link in the notes below on this video. I hope you've enjoyed this class. Please leave me some feedback if you did, and what other subjects you might like a short class on too.