Graphic Design Theory - Typography

1. Introduction: The primary aim of typography is effective communication. But it can achieve a lot more than assuring eligibility and readability of text. Good typography can also set the tone of a design, establish hierarchy within a composition, and grab the attention of viewers. In this course, we will cover all aspects of typography, including learning about type anatomy, text alignment, classification of typefaces, common typographic mistakes, and ways to avoid them, and so much more to make the training engaging and help you understand and remember the terms that will be covered. We will analyze various designs from posters, book covers, business cards and billboards, to websites, mobile apps, and banner ads. By the end of this course, you will never look at texts in the same way. Again, you will be judging the carning of actors names on movie posters, spotting regs and rivers in magazines, and scrutinizing the fun choices in restaurant menus. While this may annoy your family and friends, you will feel so much more confident as a graphic designer together with the exciting class project that I hope you will complete at the end of the course. You also have the analysis worksheet and the term glossary to help you practice everything that you've learned. I hope you are just as excited as I am to get started and dive into the sea of knowledge and beautiful graphic design examples. 2. Why learn about Type?: The first and probably most important question is, why should you learn about typography in the first place? Well, most designs would have type in them. Some of them are relying on type a lot like a magazine spread, a brochure, or a poster. But other designs which are maybe more heavy on illustration or photography, maybe have just smaller amounts of text. But type is still usually an integral and important detail which obviously helps communicating the message that the design is intended for. Because don't forget, graphic design is a form of visual communication. And besides visuals and imagery, the clearest message we can always convey by using text. However, text is also a bit more restrictive than imagery, since it is based on the language that we are using and sometimes even the type of language we are using. So even for an English speaker, you might be using terms that are not familiar. So compared to visuals, text can be always a bit more restrictive. However, it can be much more clear in whatever you are trying to communicate. On my screen, you can see examples of all kinds of different designs. We have here book covers, we have posters, product packaging, magazines, web designs, websites, web banners, illustrations, logos, UX design, and even movie credits and street signs. What's common amongst all of these is the use of textual elements. And I'm not trying to, or I don't even feel like I need to convince you that mastering and working with text is crucial for any designer. Because just like other skills like handling color, for instance, or coming up with good compositions, working with text and understanding typography is essentially going to give you confidence whenever you have to create a design. Typography is a huge topic and has a lot of depth to it. So we could spend many, many hours covering all of these rules and learning every term and definition that you can think of. And I don't think that would be useful. So what I believe is that there are certain terms and definitions that you have to know, and these are very useful and will really help you improve your work. While there are others that can be also useful in very specific cases or in case you are planning to create or design your own funds. But my aim with discourse is really to get you up to speed, to a very strong and confident level where you understand what you need to pay attention to, how you should choose your funds, what are the considerations, how you should pair them? And really focusing on these crucial skills and practicing on real examples is what I believe is going to be most useful. So this is by no means a complete guide covering every single term and definition, but more of a condensed and simplified source of knowledge which you can rely on whenever you need to create anything that involves textual elements. So now that we are clear on why it is useful to learn about typography, we will start with a very important difference between legibility and readability in our next lesson. 3. Legibility: You probably heard of legibility or readability, or maybe both of them. And it is quite difficult to differentiate these two terms or objectives that you as a designer really have to pay attention to. Legibility is probably the one that you heard most about and the one that most likely makes sense. It basically means whether you can read something or not. So this is more about whether you are physically able to make sense of some text on a design. Now, there's usually a clear difference between handling body copy, which you would have in books and magazines, and that's the main textual elements. So you could have the intro paragraph or entry paragraph, sometimes larger in text size. And then you would have the rest of the copy written in smaller size text. But then you also have headings, titles, or chapter titles, which are usually much larger in size and formatted differently. So to be clear, all of these elements will need to be legible, so the viewer will have to be able to read them. But how you present them really depends on their part that they're playing within the design. While body copy is a longer text that has to be easy to read, titles could be always a little bit more playful because they are shorter and they are larger in size, so there's more room to play around with them. So for instance, here on the left side, we have a large number which is marking the chapter overlaid by the actual chapter title. Does this affect the eligibility? I would say it doesn't because we have a clear contrast between the colors. So we have black and red on top of each other, very easy to distinguish. And also we have a huge contrast in size and even the font used. So while the text in black is using a normal sensory font like Helvetica, we have a condensed boulder font used for the numbers in the background to assure eligibility. On the right side, we have the most standard and most comfortable set of colors used, white backdrop and black text. If you ever use the opposite white text on black background or bright text on darker background, that we would refer to as inverted text. And it can still work. However it is the same colors, they are just inverted. The design is still going to suffer a bit in legibility, so I wouldn't recommend using it for longer set of texts, like for a book or a magazine. Where for a poster like this one, it could work quite nicely. And it can easily stand out and also set the mood or the tone of the design. So why would this poster use black background? Well, for some reason, whenever we think of jazz, it usually is played at night time. So it has already that connotation in our mind, and especially because the text also refers to this as an all night entertainment, it really makes sense. But also don't forget, on the piano, which is the most commonly used instrument for jazz, you would have the black and white keys, which could of course be represented with white background and black text on top of it. However, most pianos, the actual instruments that the jazz musicians use are black, So having a black background and a lot of negative space sets that natural proportion of the instrument and the keyboard on it. Understanding all of that really starts to help us to appreciate the composition and the choice of colors on this poster. Now that we start to understand how to work with legibility, here's a few examples that challenges the concept of making text legible. For instance, we have this poster void where we can still read the title, and all of those subtitles are secondary information, but it is challenging the viewer. We have to work a little bit harder to put together everything, and we almost have to turn the page around to be able to read things correctly. So this composition or layout definitely affects the legibility. It reduces it, but since there's not a lot of text to go through, it is not going to be annoying. Instead, it will be a little bit more of a playful fun exercise to go through the information on the poster or flyer. There can be also examples and reason why a designer would choose to mess with characters or fonts like here. For instance, there's lots of ways that the viewer is challenged to be able to read. The main text is not only divided into several lines, but also there's no clear alignment, so we have ragged edge on both left and right. But more importantly, we have even each of the characters broken up or divided into small pieces. So all of these are working against legibility. However, there are also things that are supporting it. The size, first of all, of the text that's used here, but also the contrast from the background. So black is obviously the highest contrast color used in this design. That really stands out from the background even though there again are some confusing, colorful shapes behind it. And this just goes back to the main and most important lesson to learn once you understand what are the rules in this case, that you need to assure legibility, the next step is always to start pushing those boundaries. So understanding the rules will give you the confidence to push the limits and really challenge your viewers without making your designs annoying or confusing. That doesn't mean that you always have to do designs like these. Again, we have very low legibility on this text here or this one where we have certain characters really stretched out. Not to mention the type of illustrations where the text is not really meant to be read. It's used more as a graphical element to recreate a portray or again, to convey a certain message. But besides using text in these more unconventional ways, most of the time you want to really retain legibility. So you want to have a very good legibility like in user interface design. It has to be very clear the message, where users can find certain features. And the text also has to set a good hierarchy, whether it is black text on a background or inverted text. As we've seen before, you as a designer has to think of legibility as a slider that you can adjust for certain elements like the names of a pizza. In this case, legibility can be lowered a bit to add that flavor and style to the names, while the ingredients and the additional copy below and especially call to action. Elements like buttons should have much higher legibility achieved, mainly in this case by using fonts that are just generally much easier to read. 4. Readability: So it's time to now talk about readability, which is the other way of thinking about how you should present type in your designs. And the main difference here compared to legibility, is whether your viewer or reader would want to read your designs or the textual elements within your designs. So it's not about being able to read it, which was legibility. It's about whether they would want to read it or not. So it is more about their desire, whether they want to read your copy or not, or how much fun or enjoyment they get out of it while reading it. How can you improve readability? You can think of readability as how user friendly your type is, or the ergonomics of your typography. And the most effective way to improve readability of your designs, especially if you have a lot of text, is to have as many entry points as possible. We will talk about this later, but essentially it is to have these clear points where readers can start reading on this spread. We have many areas where they can start their reading. We also have a clear heading or title here. We also have another little section there. We also have these huge numbers helping us to jump through the text so we can clearly follow the original intented direction or route of the copy. And all of these pointers and divisions in the copy helps us to digest the information and go through it without too much effort. And the fact that the order of the text here is a little bit all over the place, so it's jumping between the pages is not that big of a problem because it actually helps to move the viewer's eye from left side to the right and then back again. So it almost gives a little bit of exercise or challenge without, again, being annoying. And that is also a fine balance you have to play with as a designer. So you don't want your design to be too boring and have a lot of texts in one place. But you also don't want your designs to be too challenging to read. So here is an interesting example. We have a lot of texts in this block in the center. That's our body copy, but we have an entry point which is a drop cap. And we also have some poll codes which are breaking up the text. And then the main title and intro paragraph here in the center. Since this is a newspaper, we can expect a lot of copy that needs to be placed on a single page. And even though we have this big block of text with six columns, it is still quite fun thanks to that illustration that is divided by the text and is appearing on the top and the bottom. And also by having these negative spaces or pauses within the design. That again, just helps to create a little bit of playfulness and leave some breathing space for the reader. But there is also another interesting detail here. The title of the magazine is actually almost completely, or at least half of it, is hidden behind the illustration. Now, this is also something that you commonly see in magazine covers as well. And it relies on the fact that the reader is familiar with the newspaper and they would recognize the title even if it's not complete. Again, here, this is actually blocking legibility. We are just physically unable to read that part of the text. But in terms of readability, this is setting a fun challenge and again, can attract the reader's attention because it leaves a blank space here, which our mind will have to fill in via this title. In terms of legibility is really weak in terms of readability. It is actually quite good because it piques the interest of the reader. And lastly, I'm going to show you three examples where both legibility and readability are bad, and I have to warn you, it might hurt your eyes. Here are these examples. First, we have signage which is used for London buses. I don't think this sign is out anymore. I'm sure it's been fixed by transport for London. But when it was photographed, it clearly had some issues, both affecting legibility and readability. The biggest problem is the bad tracking or kerning, which caused these characters to get too close to each other in certain places, almost turning some of these into ligatures. Unintentionally, ligatures are font pairs which normally are individual characters within a font. But we also have really bad separation of important details like Stop M divided into two lines, or London Bridge, again, divided into two. Which even with a small measure or line width like here, should still be kept together in the same line. Now what's even worse is that I believe there's even a grammatical error here. So this apostrophe, I think, is a mistake because it was supposed to say roots 43.141 but currently it would mean that these numbers belong to this root. Grammatical mistakes or typos like this would affect mainly the readability because it causes confusion and the reader might actually misinterpret some information in case of a sign that is about getting from one place to another can be quite a serious problem. The other two examples that we have here are equally bad in terms of legibility and readability as well. We have very bad design choices in terms of what colors are used on top of each other, what type of fonts are used for certain information, The kerning and tracking and alignment of things, the unnecessary variety of fonts piled into one design. And I could go on, I'm sure you can see all of these. And I believe for everyone to be able to improve, it is just as important to look at these bad examples and analyze them as spending time and looking at good examples that we've seen earlier in this video. So now that you are aware of your main objectives, improving legibility and readability, next we will talk a bit about the basic terms of typography. 5. Calligraphy and Lettering: You probably heard of calligraphy or hand lettering, and these are completely different skills to setting type. As a graphic designer, you are working mainly with type faces. So these are phones that you can use for your designs and all the characters are already there. You just have to start typing them in and obviously work on the composition. Compare to this, if you're asked to do calligraphy or hand lettering, that is more of an art form similar to illustration where each character has to be drawn individually in a certain style, it is hard to clearly distinguish these two terms. However, I would say calligraphy is more of a traditional approach, and you can see some examples here in various languages. You would see these in encyclopedias and old lexicons. Traditionally, this type of writing was used for everything, including the titles, drop caps, and even the body copy. However, nowadays in modern caligraphy, it's usually used for single words or phrases. And the body copy is very rarely written in this style. Even individual characters can look very complex and pleasing, so they can easily be used as a design element on a magazine spread, for instance, or as a really stand out drop cap on the other hand, hand lettering, which can be either traditional or digital nowadays. Obviously on the ipad, it's very easy to use the apple pencil, for instance, and be able to create these type of compositions. The way you can differentiate this most of the time from calligraphy is that here the text is used more of composition, so each of the words will form a larger layout and it creates a nice badge, most of the time in a shape. It can be either a circle, a square, or any organic shapes. And it is very common to also have some floral, decorative elements, or illustrative details combined with the lettering. As I said before, calligraphy and hand lettering is not a skill that you will be required to be able to do as a graphic designer. This is a completely independent art form and more similar to illustration as I mentioned before. However, if you are interested in producing work like this, the principles and theories that we are learning in this course will be extremely useful for you. 6. Typeface vs Font: You're probably already familiar with the term font. And most graphic designers use this a lot, just referring to which font to use on a specific design. Or which fonts can be paired well together. However, typeface is another term that you should be familiar with. And actually it can be argued that the correct way to refer to most fonts is actually to call them typefaces. For instance, Helvetica is a type face. Futura or Gotham are also two other type faces. The fonts are the different variations of them. We normally call a type face a font family Helvetica. The type face would have, for instance, an ultra light font version or the Helvetica Roman font, or the Helvetica black font. And all of these variations or fonts make up the font family, or type face called Helvetica. No one is going to correct you if you're saying that Helvetica is a font. But if you want to be more accurate, try to refer to it as a type face. But of course, you can still say, for instance, I used Helvetica board font for the title in a design. In another lesson, we will talk more about what goes into a typeface or what are the contents usually of a typeface also. Which are the type faces that are recommended to get used to working with and the ones that will really serve you well, mainly thanks to the variety of fonts inside them. 7. Classification of Typefaces: You most likely already heard of Serif and San Serif typefaces funds and that's one way of classifying them. But there's actually quite a lot more to it. And also it's important to know when to use which class of type face. So in this with you, we will be covering the most important information about this topic. First of all, what are serifs? These are the small little details or embellishments that help to make letters more distinctive on serif typefaces, while sun actually means without. So in this case, without serifs, these type of typefaces wouldn't have any of those type of embellishments. They would be much more simplistic and minimalistic. Serif font, sometimes also referred to as Roman. And that is mainly because it was based on the engraving style of Roman scripture, While sunserif is sometimes referred to as grotesque. However, that's only a certain type of sanserif. It's probably better not to use that term as a general classification before learning more about the difference between sanserif and serif typefaces. Here is a little bit of background information on the history or evolution typefaces. And this is a huge topic and I wouldn't want to cover everything. But this infographic really summarizes things well, because it shows really clearly the four main type of classes or categories for fonts or typefaces. So first we have script within which the most common one that you would recognize is black letters. So these are the really old, traditional type of letters invented around the time when first printing started. So it's actually around the time Johannes Gutenberg invented the movable type with the printing press. And these type faces were always emulating hand lettering. They also evolved throughout the time, so they got a little bit easier to read with the new casual format and then later on the formal version of them. But as you can see, they were the first that we would consider as typefaces. And then not much later, the first serif fonts, or typefaces appeared. So this is the second color we have here, and there's many categories for them, but the first one that we would consider appearing around the early 1500s was the old style category. Adobe garment is one instance of it. But of course, there's many variations and it has evolved and changed throughout the time. But even looking at this text here, you can still tell that heritage and classical feel to it that has been preserved even in this new digital format. So coming back to our infographic, we can see that Serve funds actually existed for over 500 years, but Sunsifunds only appeared around 1,800 Now this is again an important transition in the history of type faces and the most notable and important one to mention is Caslon, which is here we can see William Caslon. Fourth was the one introducing Sunserif printing type. This was a revolutionary change or step in printmaking and it really affected how we work with type up to this day. But now you know that even though Sunserif type faces look modern, they actually are more than 200 years old by now. And they also evolved and changed throughout the time, just like Sunserif type faces. So there's several categories like grotesque, humanist, geometric, square, and so on, so forth. Finally, the last category that we would consider decorative fonts appeared around the early 20th century. And you can find an abundance of these on free font sites like Dafont. But even on Adobe fonts, several tags would lead you to these type of decorative fonts, like fun, for instance, or funky. Now these, of course, tend to be the least legible out of all the classes. However, they can be great for capturing a very specific tone of voice or theme for your copy. And of course, these mainly are used for titles and headlines and not for the body copy or longer amount of text. 8. Serif vs Sans Serif: So now that we have a brief understanding of how these classes of typefaces evolve, we can concentrate on the difference between Serif and Sunseriffunds. Because as a graphic designer, these are the most important ones that you will be working with. And you should know the advantages and disadvantages of using one over the other. As a general guide, most creatives would recommend to work with Serif or Roman typefaces in print and use Sunserif on the web or any digital format. This is a bit of a generalization. But it's true that the Serif attributes or details help with legibility, because first of all, they give a general guide or horizontal direction to the reading. All of these little details all tend to guide you through reading the text. But more importantly, they also glue characters together and form better units for words. Again, for longer amount of text, that is very helpful, because the spaces between the words will be more distinct. And as I said, words will be glued together forming better units. So why would we ever use Sunsif if it's easier to read Serif typefaces? Well, one of the biggest reasons why in digital design you would use Sunserif over Serif because of the pixilation on the Serif details. You already have small text, let's say for your body copy and it's on a website, on those small text, the even smaller serifs would definitely start pixelating. And that's not really ideal you would want to use, especially for smaller copy Sunserif when it comes to websites and applications, user interface, so on so forth. Based on some studies, around 70% of text on the B is using Sunserif fonts. Now it doesn't mean that you can't use Sunserif in print or Serif in digital format. These are more like general guidelines and useful considerations. But as long as you understand the reasoning behind it, you will be able to break away from it in certain cases. And of course, you can also pair these two together so you don't have to stick to using one class in a particular design. You can have your intro copy and your title or heading in Sanserif fund, but you can have the body copy in serif. Another example of combining three different type of categories. We have the heading set in a condensed sanserif text. We have these big numbers and the main title set in more of a decorative fund. And then we have the body copy or the longer amount of text, and even this call out here set in Serif. In general, whenever you are using Seri funds, it helps to keep your design a bit more modern, fresh and simplistic. Compared to using Serif funds, you would have a little bit more traditional classical feel to your designs. And here is another example, only using Seri fund on a book cover. Both for this graphical design here in the center, but all the rest of the text is set in Serif. The traits or differences between the two classes of funds is clearly visible on the Google logo, for instance. So when it was updated to using Sun Serif from the original Seri font, it already made a huge difference in the perception of the brand and the search engine itself. It's interesting to see how much difference it makes, whether you use one class of text or the other. But also just wanted to point out that with Google Logo, one distinct feature they kept is that slant or rotation on the E, which makes it, again, a little bit more unique. But also another less obvious thing that they changed the colors. Probably the most prominent one is the green. How it got brighter, but all the other colors changed just very slightly. But coming back to the differences or pros and cons between these two main classes of type faces, it's also worth mentioning that serif fonts usually work better when it comes to setting things in italics. This is something that you can see clearly demonstrated here. Italic or italic is also sometimes referred to as obliques. These are the slightly slanted characters, while sunserif fonts tend to have low contrast obliques, meaning that they are not that different from the regular normal cases. You would have much more contrast for italics when it comes to the serif type faces. So you can see that this text here looks very different and contrasting to the regular character set. This is again a big advantage when it comes to books where italics or obliques are often used to highlight certain things. Let's say someone is speaking or something is referred to can be set in this format. When you work with san Serif fonts, you would have to rely more on the different weights. So you can use light or bold, or ultra bold versions to highlight certain parts of the text. Here is another interesting example showing that when you're using Serif font, it's always easier to distinguish characters compared to San Serif because like the O and the C for this particular type is indistinguishable when you're only looking at the top part of it. While the Serif on the C, that little additional detail will always give away what you're looking at, even when you're just checking the top part. So this is obviously an advantage and again, helps to distinguish the characters. However, adding more details in general in graphic design means that things get more complex. And that is why sunserf ons are usually considered more casual, friendly. And actually children prefer or find reading sunserif text much easier. So there's lots of considerations, pros and cons. And I don't want to encourage you to just use one class of type faces over the other. It's all about getting familiar with the properties. And once you start working with them, you will develop an intuition on when a certain class is better than another. And if you're new to graphic design and you're still struggling to differentiate what is Serif or Sunsif type face, then I would recommend to play this game for a bit. I shot the Serif where you can set up your level. And let's just say we are middle weight right now, so I'm just going to choose that. We will get two characters and you always have to shoot the Serif ones. Now we get four of them, so we just have to do it again. And we get more and more. And then we have to be as fast as possible going through this. And we can see that we have a certain amount of errors allowed, six in this case. And so far we have this much score and we found 14 correct serif fonts. I highly recommend this one to play around with. But there's also another good one, type War.com where again, you will have to be able to tell what type face you are looking at. This will help you to get familiar with the most commonly used type faces. It is also a good practice to start remembering whether a type face has serifs or not. In this case, we are saying Times New Roman. Then we move on. When we now see again Times New Roman, you will always see whether you are correct or not. On the left side, you will be able to tell the correct answer for the previous question. Now we are looking at, I think, Helvetica Noya. This one is optimum, this one is Dido, and we are on a streak. Now let's just try to keep that up, Dido again, and this one is also Dido. And I'm going to stop there because eventually I'm going to make a mistake. Remember, even the typography is a huge topic and there's a lot of history and rules. Even if right now you feel a bit intimidated by all of these different things that we covered, remember, it all comes down to how much you enjoy doing things and consider type faces your friends Once you get to know them and how to work with them, it will be much more fun and you will be enjoying the process of design. 9. Type Anatomy : When it comes to terms and definitions, the scariest thing that you can encounter is the anatomy of type. There are so many names for certain features within characters or letters, and you can see some of these here on this Miller Note Board. But I'm not going to bore you with all of these. And believe me, you don't have to know all of these to be good at graphic design. However, there's a few specific terms that I found very useful for my professional work. And it really improved the way I work with type. I think the first and most important things to remember are the distinct lines within the text. So you would start with the baseline. That's probably the most important one. That's where most of your characters would be sitting on. Now of course, some details would cross this line and they would be called descenders for lower case characters, but they can also be tails on upper case characters. And for most type faces, you would actually have a specific line called descender line, which all these descender details will align to. This is very important when you have multiple lines on top of each other because the leading or the spacing between your lines will have to be set in a way that these details won't be clashing or getting too close to the other details on top called ascenders. And again, for these details you would have the ascender line, which as you can see, normally is slightly higher than the cap height, which is used for the top of the upper case characters. Now even there, there is a slight difference. Normally the round characters like the O would have a bit of an overshoot, so they would go just a little bit over the cap height. The main reason for this is if they kept at the same size, the cap height would be the same for Q or C characters. They would actually feel smaller to characters like E, and that is mainly because of that big space or negative space inside them, which we also call counter space or ball, if we want to be technically accurate in terms of the anatomy of type. So remember the term x height, this is actually something we will be talking about later. This is used for the size or the height of the lower case characters. And cap height, which is used for the upper case characters height. And there is also a measurement called body height, which would be the top and bottom lines, which would never be exceeded by any of the characters. And that is usually the minimum space you would need for your leading or line spacing to keep the text legible. Now besides the heights, the width of for characters are also important. And most fonts or typefaces are proportional, meaning that the characters have different width to them, which we would call body width. So we can see it on the x character here. But it would be different again for the upper case characters. And even between characters, that would be quite a big difference, the width of W or would be always very different from the character I. For instance, type faces where you have the body width and character width for all of the characters the same, we refer to as monospace. This is actually something that was invented for typewriters, so it's very rare that we would use monospace text in digital format, because most of the typefaces are now proportional apart from a few exceptions like Courier. But most importantly, what you need to remember is that you can have the same height for characters, but the set width or body width can be very different between typefaces or fonts that you're working with. Why is it important? Well, mainly because if you are choosing a type face of fund that has a wide set width of body width for the characters, then it will be harder to fit the same amount of text on a page compared to if you are using a narrower set width type phase. Sometimes the difference can be extreme. So you can have twice as much text set with the same text size but different set width on a page. Here is a more subtle example, but still something that shows the difference between two funds set in the same size. But because of the attributes of the funds having difference both for the site and the body width, it produces a quite different space that the text is going to take up. Once again, the font size is the same, but Century School book takes up much more space compared to Times New Roman. It is again about the balancing act between having more condense text and be able to compress more information in a certain space compared to giving your text a little bit more breathing space and making the reading experience a little bit easier. And sometimes even making text more legible. Now, ligature is another term that's worth remembering. This means when you have certain character pairs that can be represented with an individual character. Which improves legibility. So you can see the difference on the top without using ligatures. And for this particular type face which has a set of ligatures, it immediately becomes much more easier to read these specific paths once the ligatures are in use. Besides improving legibility, they are also good of reducing the width of these sets of characters. And even a small thing as just simply having ligatures available and enabled for body copy can make actually quite a big difference in terms of how much text you can fit on a page. So when choosing a typeface for body copy, it's always recommended to check whether ligatures are included or not in that character set. As I mentioned, besides the terms that we covered in this video, there's so much more that you can learn about and most of these can be useful. But believe me, without knowing all of these terms that we have here on the screen, you will still be able to design great things and be able to work with type professionally. However, if you want to study them, there's a lot of resources online. And you can also use this Mill and Note board where I have a couple of good explanations and info graphics on all the terms that you can learn about. But I also recommend, again, are two games on Love Typography.com you can find several font anatomy games where you will need to go through these multiple choice questions. So for instance, with baseline, you will have to remember which one was that. So I think we already covered that and you most likely will remember it. But then you will get also these other ones that we haven't covered. The sender again, it's something that we talked about and so on and so forth. But there is also this game called Shape Type, where you will have to actually finish the curvature of certain characters. And it will really help you to appreciate those small details and curves used on characters. So you can hold on shift key here by the way, to keep your anchors, or direction lines straight, which is most of the time, important for these characters. And then when you feel like it's ready, you can compare it to the original one. We can see how close I got, 84% not that bad. We can see the original letter and then my one. Yeah. Well, there's not that much difference there. Let's just go to the next one. Let's just do one more. All right, so we have now Si font, quite common, one that's used often, we just have to drag this up and then the other anchor has to come down. All right, I feel like it is something like that. Let's try to set this up here as well. Okay, This one is a bit tricky, 100% sure. Obviously, we can't move it left and right, in this case just up and down. It has to be more smooth, these curves for sure. Just drag it up and down until I get a better result. Okay, I think that's quite close. Let's check. All right, so we actually have done a little bit better on this. Once again, original and our letter. So make sure you give these games a go as well if you are already tired about learning the terms that we covered. But in the next video, we will be finally moving on to a very important question, How to choose a fund. 10. Leading, Tracking, Kerning: There are three terms and two keyboard shortcuts we will learn in this with you. These are very important and something that you would be using all the time in your designs. It is kerning, leading and tracking. Now let's start with leading because I feel like that's the easiest one to understand. Leading is essentially the spacing between the lines in your copy. This mainly applies if you have longer amount of text. Like here we have a few paragraphs and set into two columns. So if I use the shortcut when I have text selected Alt or option up and down arrow. With this, I can adjust the leading so I can space the text out more or have it more compressed. Now if we increase the leading, we can see that it gets a little bit easier and more convenient to read the text. However, if you increase it too much, it starts to fall apart. And it will be harder to differentiate where a paragraph ends and where another one starts, compared to a tighter Ledding which we had originally. This is how it looks, more spaced out. Now of course, you don't have to only rely on the shortcut. You can also come to the character formatting controls and you will find leading here just underneath the text size. This is the second most important option that you will have to work with. It has an auto function which will always set the Ledding based on the text size. For instance, if we set the text size to ten points, then we will see that the Ledding will be set to 12 points. That additional 20% in terms of the size of the Ledding compared to the font size is a default that is used most of the time for Ledding. But as we've seen, we can always override this and set it to whatever we prefer. Generally, if you need to compress text on a smaller space, you will have to use lower leading. While if you have more space to work with, you can start increasing the ledding. With that, generally, you can improve readability or make it more convenient or comfortable to read your copy. Now let's say that you want to stick to using a specific font size and leading, but you don't have enough space to fit the text. I just made my text frame smaller. And we have some overset text here. If I press commando control I on the keyboard. In, in design we will be able to see exactly how much text is overset. It's only a couple of words, but still we don't have space for it currently. So how can we fix this? Well, first of all, we can select the whole body copy. And then press command Y just to switch back to our main window and still have the same text selected. This is a useful technique by the way, whenever you have overset text and you want to make sure that is also selected before you are making changes to the formatting. So now that we have this all selected, instead of changing the font size or the leading, we will use another shortcut alter option, left and right arrow, to adjust the tracking. Now, tracking is the horizontal space or spacing between the characters, which will start condensing them and keep them closer to each other without distorting of course, the actual characters themselves. So if I go extreme on this, eventually it will be almost illegible and very hard to see what's going on. But of course we can find that right balance where we just about managed to fit the text into the text frame. And still we have a fairly good legibility on our copy. Where can you find tracking in the settings? This is another option that you will find under the character formatting controls. So this is the one right here. Currently we went to -40 If I set it back to zero, that was the original tracking. If I want to jump to a specific value, let's say -35 I can also just type it in and you can see actually that already fits because the shortcut would automatically jump ten point increments. For tracking, it might be actually better to refine it and fine tune it using a specific value in the control bar. Now, how far you can push the tracking either in a minus or a positive way really depends on the selected type phase. So it greatly varies. Some type phases like this one is quite flexible, while others might be less responsive to these type of changes. So we covered lending and tracking. But what is kerning then? This is very similar to tracking. However, this is when you individually and uniquely adjust character spacing between certain characters instead of globally and equally adjusting the spacing for a longer amount of text like we've done before. So for instance here with our heading, we might need to use a little bit of kerning, because there's a couple of characters like W and A. Which feels like it has a little bit too much space. So if we zoom closer, you can probably see this better if I put my cursor in there and use old left and right arrow. It's the same shortcut as tracking. But in this case, because we have the cursor just play specifically there, it's not going to change the other characters. It's uniquely adjusting this spacing here. With that, I could improve already a bit how this headline is going to read, but we can also do a little bit of adjustment between certain characters like H and I or H and E, where we have these vertical lines next to each other. We can also adjust that a little bit. And then let's just move a little bit further here. I feel like I and can go closer and as well, and then most likely we can have a little bit less spacing here between these characters as well. Now if we zoom out, you might not notice a huge difference here. But if we jump back and forth between before and after, you will notice that we actually adjusted a fair amount of spacing and it resulted in a slightly narrower space necessary for the headline. So it actually much nicer aligns to our body copy, but also quite importantly, the separation between the words got clearer. Because now we don't have that much space between the individual letters. Ning can improve both readability and legibility. But more importantly, these larger details like headlines, chapter titles, or titles once they are cured, will look much more professional than without the kerning. And there is no exact science of what is the right kerning. It's more about aesthetically setting a balance or rhythm between your characters. And if you want to practice this and we want to develop an eye for it, again, I recommend another game called Current Type, where you will be able to drag these characters around and then find the right kerning. The first and last character, you won't be able to move. That sets the boundaries, but anything in between you will have to play around with it. And when you feel like you're done, you can again check your score. And I've done quite a bad job here, so it's only 78% out of 100. But let's try another one. We have Germont font or typeface we talked about earlier. Once again, we try to find the right kerning here. Okay, let's just say something like that. Again, I'm quite off, so we can see just the solution and my spacing. I move the Y too close to the. And actually the better kerning is to leave a bit more space here, not to squeeze the Y under the bar of the. Let's go to another one. I will try not to move the V too close to the Y. Something like that. Okay, I actually got this perfectly. However I feel like there is still a difference between the solution and mine, but I think it accepted it as 100% score. You can even use keyboard shortcuts for this game, which you can find here on the top. These are not the same shortcuts that you will be using in, in design, Photoshop or Illustrator. But it definitely makes playing this game a bit easier and more similar to how you would professionally work with type in these applications. In a nutshell, for your body copy or longer amount of text, always pay attention to leading and tracking. And use these to improve legibility, but also to be able to adjust the amount of space your text takes up. Kerning is something you have to pay attention to when it comes to larger copies like headings and titles, which has less amount of characters. But that the spacing between characters becomes even more important and more noticeable if they are not balanced or not evenly spread out. In the next video, I will show you five of the most common typographic scenes and how to eliminate them in your designs. 11. Picking Fonts: In this video, we will cover a couple of best practices on selecting the right font for your designs. And I would start with the saying that I always keep in mind the best font choices are the ones which the reader don't notice as a font, just simply can concentrate on the message. So just like everything in design, less is usually more. So don't overdo things and don't pick a font that is too decorative or too overs stylized for a certain message. Like here, I picked a font that I felt like goes a little bit with that wartime feel without being too militaristic. So if we wanted to, we could easily replace this with something more that connects to the army or war. If we looked for maybe something like stencil, this one is even more emphasized. And we can make this bigger, just so we can see those details at it there. And it is always a fine balance to decide what's too much and what's still okay to use. Like in this case, I would say you can easily get away with this as well and it could work. But it really depends on what kind of publication this is, the target audience. So you have to know your readers and what they would relate to better. Now I have to be honest with you, almost every designer, when they start a and even after years of designing, they probably waste the most time on selecting funds in Adobe Applications. So let me just demonstrate this to you. Let's say I am not sure what I want to use for the heading in this case, and I would just go here to the fund selector. So this is the most dangerous part in the application where we would just keep scrolling up and down and looking for funds. Now if you are a little bit more advanced, you might use the up and down arrows and you go through them much faster and find maybe potential ones that way. And if you are good, you might even start setting the ones that you like as favorites, which you can do again here from the drop down. And then you can just set the little star on the ones that you picked or that you selected. And that way later on you can very quickly filter for them and find them much faster. Or if you want to save more time, you can just then click on Show Similar Fonts, which would find all the fonts that you will be able to work with that looks very similar to the one that you selected. Let's just say we pick this one here on the top. And once again, I can mark this also as a favorite. And now if I turn on the filtering for favorites, it will be much easier to switch between these two. I can even again, use the up and down arrows just to compare which one I prefer. And if you already set several funds as favorites, you can always remove them. And that way you can simplify how much options you can see at once. And if you want to switch to seeing the recently used fonts, you can also set the filtering based on that. But don't forget that filtering works in a way that it adds the criteria. So you have to remove searching for favorites and only see recently used ones or vice versa. Because if you have two of these conditions set at the same time, you will have a much more limited list that you will be seeing. Now a good thing about using Adobe Applications is that they are connected to Adobe funds. So even funds that are not currently installed on your computer will show up in this list. If you want to make sure that you're only using funds that are on your computer, you can just turn on the activated funds option, which is another filter here. Now when this is off, you will by default, see only funds currently available on your computer, Adobe funds and other additional funds that you have. But if you want to find additional ones, you can also just switch to find more. And here you will be searching the entire library of Adobe fonts, which there are thousands of funds that you can search for. But if you want to filter them out, you can also choose these very useful filters for classification. So let's say we are looking for something, in this case sanserif. We want it to be heavy, bolder characters. And then if I wanted to refine it even further, there's additional options for the width and the height, and even the contrast within the character, so we can keep it low contrast or high contrast. And once these filters are set, now we will be able to scroll through and find the one that we are looking for. One of the most useful tips, which can save you so much time is that instead of having hundreds or thousands of fonts on your computer, it's always good to have, let's say, ten to 20 fonts that you are very confident in working with and you are really familiar with. And these typefaces should have several fonts in them, so lots of various options, like one that I use a lot is Dean 2014. So if I just type that in, you will see that this already has several variations, and it can make a big difference if I set it to extra light. Compared to extra bald. And for each weight we also have the italic versions giving us a lot of variety and freedom in how we work with this type phase when it comes to choosing those few funds that you will be relying on as a designer and you will be coming back to. Besides your personal preferences, it's always good to check the amount of characters in them. So the best way to do this is to go to the type menu and choose glyphs in design. And here you will be able to see all of the characters available for that font. So in this case, we are looking at N 2014 extra bold font, but we can set that to the regular version of it. So these are all the available characters. And if we want to filter for specific things, let's just say punctuation, we can see all of that together. But we can also find additional things here, like ligatures, something that we mentioned before. And for this particular font, there are no ligatures available. So that's actually a disadvantage, but there's other special characters that you might need, especially if you are setting a book using this font. Let's say you might need superscript characters. Let's just check if we have them. We have them but only up to four, so we don't have the full character set. So that might be an issue. We might need math symbols if this is a bit more scientific publication that we are working on. And again, it is quite limited, so it doesn't have all of those characters. So compared to this pont, we can check maybe aerial, whether that has more. And yeah, it has slightly more there, but we can check Adobe clean. Yeah, slightly more. But once again, we can check that it has actually a lot of more options here. And if we go into standard ligatures, we can see that it actually includes those characters as well. And if you want to take a closer look at these characters, you can always use the zoom in option so we can take a better look at them. And believe me, it is worth analyzing some of the funds that you've already been using from this perspective. Whether they have enough characters in them, whether they support different languages, for instance, because those require also special characters. And that is actually also something that on EdOBfunds you will be able to search for. So if you are working with a specific set of languages, you can make sure that you select funds that will support them. So there's a lot of languages here that you can choose from. My native language is Hungarian, so I'm just going to pick that for now. And we can see that currently there are 247 fund families that support that language writing system or special character set. Another thing that you can do on Dob fonts if you're looking for type faces to work with, is to set the properties higher instead of showing all of them. You would set it, let's say, to anywhere 20-25 plus, which will filter for font families or typefaces that have lots of variations in them. So we can see for instance, novel sun hair has 120 fonts inside it. If we view this family, we will see the huge variety of options that we will have inside it. And if I set it to list, and if we scroll through here, you can see the abundance of options we will have. Different width and different heights italic, all kinds of options, giving you a lot of flexibility and freedom on how you can use this type phase. The good thing is that if you have a Creative Cloud license or subscription, there is no limitation on how many activated funds you can have from Adobe funds. At one time, there used to be a quite strict limit, I think, of 100 activated funds, but now you can have as much as you want or it set so high that I never had issues exceeding it. According to this infographic, the top ten type faces that are most commonly used are these. We have Helvetica as the first one, and then we have Garmin, which we already talked about, but then we have a few other ones that I also personally use very often. We have Futura Bodoni, which are both brilliant typefaces to work with. But we also have Gill's son on this list, which was actually invented by Eric Gill who owned the bookshop in Bristol, England. He actually used this font, or he created these characters for the window display, and later on this actually turned into a type face. I'm not saying that as a designer, you will have to stick to working with these ten fonts. But they are a good place to start. And they will give you the amount of flexibility and variety necessary because they have lots of variations and they have all kinds of different characters that you would need to be working with. But most importantly, they are also great in terms of eligibility and readability. Check this infographic out on the Milano Board if you're interested to see all the other commonly used type faces. If you want to learn more about the history or the background of commonly used fonts, then there is a book called Just My Type by Simon Garfield, which I can highly recommend. It's a good read, but it's also very informational, and you can learn a lot about these commonly used type faces. But now that we covered how to pick a type face, the next step is to learn about how to pair type faces together. 12. Pairing Fonts : So if you think that choosing funds is difficult, then pairing funds you might find even harder. Because there's, again, a lot of considerations that you have to keep in mind. But don't worry, it is not that complicated. So let me try to simplify this process for you. First of all, what you need to avoid is to choose two similar funds and put them together. Like here, we have two very similar, almost identical funds used together, one for the heading, the other is for body copy. And there is just no point in using two funds in this case. Maybe just find a typeface or font family where you will have different weights that you can use and something that will function both for the heading and the body copy. So instead of relying two independent funds from different type faces, you just use a single type face with multiple variations. So having contrast between the funds that you are pairing or using together within one design is probably the most important thing that you have to watch out for. But using completely different funds together can also be a problem. So if you push this to the other side and it will go to the other extreme, you might end up having clashing funds that have nothing to do with each other. So having too much contrast is, again, not ideal when it comes to printing. One useful consideration you can keep in mind is to make sure that you are matching the x height as close as possible of the two fonts that you are pairing up. I will show you an example of this in another video, but for now just remember that you can find funds from different categories or classes like Serif and Sunserif. But having their X heite matching will already create some kind of unity between them, which is going to help you to make your designs look more professional. Not to mention that you will be able to use the same leading or line spacing, and it will be much easier to set up your grid and align things in general. An obvious and simple solution to set up contrast between two fonts that you're trying to pair is to pick one from Serif, the other one from the Sunserif category. And that can work very well, however you don't have to do that. So you are not restricted to create contrasts like that. You can use two types of serif or two types of sunserif just as easily. And for instance, in this example we have a nice condense type of sunserif font for the main text experience. While the secondary copy, both here on the top and the bottom, is using another font which is still a serif, but it has a normal width so it's not condensed. And that already creates enough contrast. Again, if you want your work to look professional, you should use these more subtle ways of creating contrast, instead of creating something that is too obvious. In this web design example, we actually have four different type faces combined together, starting with the one used on the main title or heading. Then we have another Seri font used on this section. We have a Sunserif for the paragraph just below the title. And then we have another Sunserif used on these additional details here on the top. The same font used on the buttons on the right and also the bottom at the bottom. So is it a good idea to use so many different type faces in one? Well, I would argue that four is already pushing the limit, and I would recommend to try to stick to two or three different type faces in one design. So when you have a more complex user interface or web design, you can still rely on type faces which has a lot of different fonts in it. And instead of using different type faces, just start varying the fonts within the same family to create the contrast and create the hierarchy that is necessary for your composition. It doesn't mean that if you're using four different type faces, like in this design, that you're making a mistake. But again, this is just something that you have to keep in mind and try to avoid. If possible, like before I have another fun game for you to practice pairing funds. It's called Type Connection and it's a dating game for type. So basically what you're doing is that you're trying to set up a date between two funds and based on their personality and characteristics, you will either make a good match or a bad one. Let's see an example. Let's say we are picking a pair for Garamond. So we already see a little bit of a backstory at the bottom, or the history of this type, but in a simplified way. We also see the introduction of this font and it's saying I'm a modern day high Renaissance man. Okay, so once we chose German, now we can choose a strategy for finding the pair. For it. We can say we want to rely on family or seek the similar, embrace the other, or explore the past. So each of these strategies is a different way of pairing this font. Let's just say we want to go with the more simple one, embrace the other, which means we are going to rely on contrast. And it says it as well. Here on the right side, opposites attract and can make relationships more exciting. Perfect. Let's just choose that so we can see our selected font on the left side. And now we have three choices that we can pick. So we have Utopia, Apollo, and Maypole. I feel like out of these, Maypole is probably the highest contrast for our original fund. But that might be a little bit too far. So maybe Utopia could be a good choice. So let's just test that out, and this is the part I love. So here you can compare the two funds and see the characteristics, whether there is enough contrast or not. And you can even read more about those sections. So it's another good way of learning about the anatomy of type. You can even toggle between which fund should be more visible when you're comparing them to each other. And these funds are quite similar to each other, their serifs are slightly different, but most prominently, the x height is different, which could be an issue. So when we compare the x height, Utopia has a much taller or higher x height compared to Garamond. And then if we want to further investigate, we can look at more examples of the different fonts within each of these type faces next to each other and start imagining whether this could work or not. So let's find out if we send them on a date, will it work or not? And unfortunately, it doesn't work because they're too similar to each other. So I am going to go back and change this to Maple instead, so the higher contrast, and yeah, we can see that there's definitely a lot of differences here. Both the body width and also the general curvature of these characters are very different. So if we test this out, now we can see that they make a successful match. I love the fact that they always show you an example. So this table of contents here on the right is actually using these two funds together. And you can see it in action that it works really nicely. If you want to learn a little bit more about the strategies according to this site that can work when you're pairing funds. You can find out more about it here on this page. And all of these methods can be useful whenever you are searching for the right pair for a fund that you're working with. Now moving on, in the next lesson, we will be learning about three very important terms. Leading, curning and tracking. 13. Common Typographic Mistakes: In this lesson we will be talking about orphans, videos, runs, regs, and reverse. Now these terms might sound strange when you first hear them, but if you are familiar with typesetting, you probably already came across some of them. Let's see in, in design how we first of all can recreate these problems or issues with our body copy and then learn also how to eliminate them. First, let's talk about reverse. This is something that you will mainly notice if you are using narrow column width and also justification put together. And you can make things worse if you are not using hyphenation. So this is something that you can control in the paragraph formatting options here. If you have hyphenation off and you have the alignment set to one of the justification options, and then you just reduce the text width or the text frames width. You will start introducing reverse here already I can point out one and another section where we have the gaps in the text and we call it usually rivers, where it affects multiple lines on top of each other. But even when it comes to individual lines having these larger gaps in between words, it doesn't look professional. If I go even further and reduce the measure or the line length, we will start to have even more of these rivers showing up and even larger gaps appearing. The best way to avoid these rivers to show up is to assure that your copy has enough measure or line width, especially if you are using justification. In those cases, I would recommend to also have hyphenation enabled. You can see even here where we didn't really have many rivers showing in the copy. By adding hyphenation or allowing hyphenation to show it already, corrects the text a bit more and spread things out a little bit better. Now, the other time I mentioned at the beginning of the lesson G is also something that refers to the alignment or the edges of your copy. This is mainly important when you use flush left or flush right, also called left align and right align, which sometimes by default, if there's no additional features used, can have a very unbalanced or ragged edge. So in this case, it doesn't look too bad. So when we look at the side here on the right, it's a little bit going back and forth, but it's not too bad. And even here on the left, this is looking quite even. But if I start moving my tax frame around, we might end up creating a more ragged edge depending on the width that we create. Something like this doesn't look that great. So already on both left and right side of these columns, we have the lines going back and forth quite a lot. So once again, this is the line I'm talking about. And to be able to refine this or balance those ragged lines, we have an option in design, which you will find once you select your copy and go to these additional options here on the right side. So click on this icon and then choose Balance Ragged Lines. That will try to refine it as much as possible. So this was before, and this is after. It certainly got a little bit better so it's more evenly distributed. And this is an option that of course you can save into a paragraph style, which then will automatically fix these problems while you are editing the copy. So now if I move my text frame around, it will always try to refine that ragged edge, which would work the same way either I'm using left or right alignment. And of course, the ultimate solution or weapon to eliminate the ragged edges is justification. But remember with this one you might be introducing rivers. So in a nutshell, when you're using justification, watch out for rivers. When you're using left or right alignment, watch out for the ragged edges. Now let's move on and talk about the other three issues that you might encounter, starting with a video, which we can already see here on this page. So a video is the last line of a paragraph in the beginning of a column. It got separated from the rest of the paragraph, and now it's completely on its own in that new column. And it can happen also sometimes, which is even worse if this copy is on another page or even worse if it's on another spread, because then the video is even more separated from the rest of the paragraph. Now similar to this, we call the first line of a paragraph an orphan. Which is separated from the rest of the paragraph at the bottom of a column or page. And the way you can remember it is that the orphan is left behind. So all the rest of the paragraph went ahead. But they left the orphan behind. Some designers wouldn't even make difference between these two terms. But I prefer to remember them as two distinct individual mistakes. Which luckily within design can be fixed. With one simple setting, all you have to do is to create a paragraph style from the paragraph styles panel. And within there you will find a feature called Keep options. Now I'm going to turn on the preview. So we can see this updating here. All you have to do is turn on Keep lines together and default setting is perfect. Because what it's going to do is to keep at the start and the end of each paragraph at least two lines together. And that's already going to eliminate orphans and videos. If you want to be more generous how many lines are kept together, you can increase this amount. And you will see it already updating here in the copy. So that was two lines at the end of the paragraph or a single line. But if we increase this then it's going to be limited to minimum have three lines of a paragraph separated onto a new column or page. Keeping lines together is your ultimate solution to eliminate orphans and vidos. And we can test this out if I click okay. Now if I try to change the copy here and recreate the orphan that we had previously. We still have two lines here at the beginning of that paragraph. But once I move this any higher, it won't let one single line, the first line, stay on its own. It's going to automatically move both lines to the next column. Keep lines is like two birds with 1 stone. We eliminated orphans and widows, but there's still one term that we need to watch out for and that is a runt. Now, runt is usually these short last lines of a paragraph that just looks very unbalanced and not professional. And these things, unfortunately, are a little bit more tricky to fix because you have to do two things. First of all, you have to set up a character style which will have a single option, and I normally just rename this as well and just call it no Break within. Here on the left side, under basic character formats, we have to turn on the no break option. That's all that we need to set for this character style. And then coming back to our paragraph style that we are already using here, we need to go inside it. And under graph style we need to choose new graph style. Select our no break character style, which becomes a nested style in this case. And then under this, you have to type in the following code. Full stop curly brackets, dollar sign. Within the curly brackets, you need to specify the minimum amount of characters you want to see in the last line of each paragraph. If we type in, let's say 15 here, and I just click immediately, it fixes those short last lines in my copy. Once again, if I go back and set this down to five, then I can allow these shorter words showing up here in the last lines. And if I want to be even more strict, I can set it, let's say, to 25. And that means we will have much longer last lines for each of our paragraphs. Now, it is actually a good thing to have less characters in the last line of each paragraph because that also helps to create a visual break and interruption between the paragraphs. So it enhances readability, which as we discussed, is very important. But having two short last lines is something you want to avoid. Now with this technique, the nested character style, using no break and setting up that graph function will automatically eliminate these runs to show up whenever you end up working with a longer amount of text. Most likely you would end up working in, in design. And then you have to make sure that you set up a paragraph style which will have the key lines together, eliminating the orphans and videos. And also this technique I just showed you with the character style nested in using graph style. And that is going to fix the runs. And then depending on whether you are using justification or left or right alignment, you have to remember to watch out for the regs and reverse. 14. Customising Fonts: Now we covered so many rules and things to keep in mind, considerations when it comes to working with type. So in these last couple of videos, I am going to give you a bit more freedom to explore creative ideas because that's what being a graphic designer is about. You first learn the rules and then you will be able to break them. And one of the things that you can do is to mess up type is to use a feature called Touch Type in Illustrator. Now this can be very useful if you want to create logos, for instance, where the characters are a bit wonky and they are moved around, rotated, and even resized compared to the original straight baseline that we get whenever we work with the text. Most importantly, this tool is actually non destructive. So you will be able to come back to it and make changes if you need to. This lesson is actually from the Illustrator master class. So if you want to learn more about this feature, you can find more information there. But in a nutshell, you will find the tool here in the toolbar, or Shift is the shortcut for it. And once you use this tool, you will be able to select individual characters and start moving them around. We can set them up in a different position and then we can start rotating them around as well and even resizing them. Now there is one annoying blue rectangle showing up here whenever we select character. And there is something that offers additional characters that can work with the selected one. Now this is an option that you can disable or turn off in the preferences. If you are on a Mac, just go to Illustrator preferences and choose type. If you are on a PC, this will be under Edit, Menu Preferences type within that. It's the last setting here, turn off show character alternates. Once that is taken off, the blue rectangle disappears. So now it's a little bit easier to work with these and just like before I can start moving things around, I can even completely change the order of characters. Of course, that is going to really mess up the legibility of this text. But that's what you can create with this tool. And as I said, this is a non destructive technique. Which means that if I use my type tool, I can still select the text, even this one here on the right, and start changing those characters if I wanted to. But they will remember their position. So if I change this to a H for instance, or an R, it will always maintain the size, rotation, and position that you originally set up. Another thing that you can do in Illustrator to customize text is to outline characters. And there is a shortcut that's worth remembering. It's command or control shift all. Or you can also find the option here in the type menu. Create Outlines or similarly. You can also use Object expand. This will also create the same result. Once you have your outline text, it's not editable anymore. That's the main disadvantage. It is going to turn the text into a group within which most likely you will have compound parts created for each of the characters. What this can help you with is to very quickly and easily double click on this group. So you enter the isolation mode and then you can easily start moving multiple characters around. Also resize them individually. And again, we can start combining these other characters here, similarly to touch type, but maybe even having a little bit more freedom. But what's even more important is that we can start distorting these characters and add unique twists to them. By maybe using the direct selection tool, we can stretch these parts of the U further up or even these points here. I can individually select and then again stretch them up. And I am really starting to change the characteristics of these letters. I can again extend the T for instance, but you can be creative. And you can even start using things like the corner Igd on certain characters. Or even the eraser with which you can start cutting into characters. And again, make them more unique, but you can be even more creative. And after messing around with a font that you only used as a starting point, you can start drawing over them and create a completely unique feel and look based on the original font that you started working with. 15. Text for Visual Interest: This video, I'm going to show you four examples of using type as a visual interest instead of simply for reading. All of these examples are from our 365 Days of Creativity course. If you are interested to learn about creative techniques like these, that course is definitely the best one. It has 365 similar creative compositions and techniques explained and covered. But starting first with this one, we have Body Hall's portray and we have the lyrics of his most famous songs used to recreate this portray. This is in illustrator using the puppet warp and all kinds of different distortions to try to match the contrasting details. All the darker tones or shades within the portray will have the typography and we will see the end result is actually quite similar to him and only a few lines were necessary for the lower contrast details to be added. As I said, the text is used as visual interest here instead of purely for reading. Then even a single word can be quite interesting in a composition if you start combining it with an image. In this case, we have the word drive by separating the characters and moving them around. Rotating them and also setting them up in different depth. So some characters will go behind the car, some will come in front of it, and also there will be different colors. Even though there's quite a lot of changes going on here, you will still be able to read the text because of the general direction from left to right and the fact that there is still similarity in size and the font used between these characters, it creates enough unity and repetition for the viewer to be able to connect the letters and read the text. Even a single character can be used to create visual interest. And these can be used for so many different things, like an interesting drop cap within a magazine or even on the cover of a book. Here we are using Photoshop with a clipping mask. We added an image on top of a text layer and then using the same image, just simply masking out details from it, using a layer mask, we can create this lovely out of bound effect, which again increases the depth and integrates the image and the text together really well. The final touch is just to add a little bit of drop shadow there, just once again to further emphasize the depth. And finally we have the mpicent, which I'm going to recreate here using an image of a banana. Once again, I'm using Photoshop and just splitting up the banana into three layers and using a smart object and the puppet warp distortions. I will be able to recreate the Mpicent with a single image. And the final result will be quite convincing and it will look quite realistic and something that could be a single banana at the end. I just have to make sure that those alignments are correct. And I just have to do a little bit of retouching to get the lighting right. And there you go. So once again, there you have a single character useful visual interest. And it could easily be on a poster, a flyer, or magazine cover. And it is quite eye catching. And people would notice this and would be interested to see what it is about. So don't forget that as your main tools in graphic design, you work with images and text, but there's nothing stopping you to turn text into imagery or visual interest instead of just purely using it for reading purposes. 16. Hierarchy with Fonts : Establishing visual hierarchy in your design is important to help your viewers easily understand the information presented to them. And there's so many different ways to establish hierarchy, you can make certain elements larger than others. You can place them in a more prominent location, like the top left corner or the center of a composition. Then of course, you can use color also to highlight and connect certain parts of the design. But what many designers get wrong is to rely on multiple type faces for establishing visual hierarchy. Each of these examples on my screen pretty much rely on a single typeface. And the hierarchy is established by varying the colors and also the various styles within the type phase. And that's really the key, that you should always work with a type phase that offers at least three different variations. So you would have your regular bold, italic, but even better if you have medium, light, extra bold, and so on and so forth. The more variety you have within a type phase, the easier it is going to be to establish the hierarchy. Take the Adobe font Monserra as an example. It has 18 different styles, ranging from thin all the way to extra bold. And as you can see when I togo through it, it really has a huge contrast between the thickest and the thinnest version. That, combined with all these variations also available in italic, gives us just almost endless possibilities for establishing different levels in the hierarchy. And if you still don't believe me, just take a look at this comparison. Here on the left side, we have a poster that relies solely on the font or type face called Rubic. While on the right side, I intentionally messed up the design and I introduced additionally three other type faces for key typographic details like the title and the headings and subheadings. I hope you can tell the difference and that it is completely unnecessary to introduce these additional type faces if you work already with a typeface that offers enough variety in the first place. Now, having said all that, of course there is a place for pairing funds. Now, whenever you do that, that has to be a reason for it. So it might help to create and further emphasize the contrast between two typographic elements within the design. And probably the most common reason why you would want to introduce two separate type faces is because certain funds work really well for body copy, so larger amounts of tax, while other funds would work better for shorter texts like headings and titles. This example, for instance, shows that for headings you can work with ponds that are set in all caps, so they don't actually have lower case characters while the other funds that are selected to pair with them of course have lower case, which will work better for larger amount of text. Combining type faces can be actually a very elegant option when again there is a reason for it. Like here on this invitation card, the script font introduced for mainly the names, and that small note at the bottom gives it a really personal touch, which of course is very important for invitations. The same thing is true for this design where we have the neon typeface. And again, a combination of a more script version paired with a sunset if condensed all caps font right here. And the reason why this design looks good is once again because it doesn't go crazy introducing various type faces. It just relies on these two that really establishes that nice contrast and the hierarchy necessary for all that information. We can see here, even when you look at calligraphy or hand lettering examples, you will see that the most successful ones don't introduce too many various styles for the text. Instead combining two contrasting ones like here. Once again, we have more of a script combined with a ser fund. And even though these are not funds, they are made to look like funds. Well, if you look at this example, it's not as effective or powerful because it introduced just too many different variations on the funds. And even with logo design where you don't really have that much text to work with, you can still make the decision to combine funds like with that lemonade stand up there. Or to rely on a single fund and just rely on the scale of the text to establish hierarchy. So remember, there are plenty of ways you can establish hierarchy in your designs, and you should only introduce additional type faces when there is really a valid reason for it. 17. Considerations when Choosing Text Color: A general misunderstanding amongst graphic designers is that you can use whatever color you wish for your text. However, this is almost true. There's a couple of important things you have to pay attention to. First of all, you have to remember that everything that goes to print will be recreated by using the CMYK inks in traditional printing. Each of these will be set up a separate plates which will all individually generate the necessary amount of little dots. Now, for instance, in here, we can see that there was a slight misalignment between these plates. And that's why we can see the dots shifted slightly. But it is a great way to understand how the four plates printed on top of each other. And the reason why this is important is because you can imagine if you are not using one of the plates at 100% your text can easily end up being fuzzy or blurry, especially on smaller texts like body copy. So when you're choosing color for your text, no matter whether it's heading, title or body copy, make sure that at least one of the CMYK values is set to 100% And in most cases, that would be the K value, which stands for black or the key color. And we can see how nicely that turned out in print. While on the other hand, if you're not using at least one of the plates on 100% then you will end up producing this fuzzy or blurry tax in print, even if there is no misalignment between the plates. We are here in Illustrator, and I have my color palette on the right. And for this text, for instance, I would like to use a color like this. Or maybe we can use the eye dropper and pick up one of these other colors. Now you can see that these values are needed to recreate that color imprint. But since none of these are at 100% you are risking, again, creating fuzzy tax in print. But of course, if the selected text is a big title, so it's large enough, it will be less likely causing trouble. And similar to this, there's another thing that a lot of designers get wrong and they start using rich black on body copy. That's again something you would want to avoid because like in the previous example or in this one, you can see if you have multiple plates printing the same text, especially on small text. Even the slightest misalignment between the plates will result in that fuzziness that I mentioned earlier. So don't get me wrong, using rich black is a great thing to really create full intense black in print. But it's not something I would use on my body copy. And just in case you are not familiar with rich black, let me show you the difference here. In Illustrator, we have this object and all the other objects here using just normal black, or sometimes referred to true black, which is simply made up of 100% black ink and nothing from the other three colors. While reach back can be something like this, where you introduce additional ink on top of the black. So here we have 40% cyan, magenta and yellow together with 100% black. And you might think that this shape and the other details here look the same. You will be surprised when I move them on top of each other that you can actually tell the difference between them. Now this is by default, not something you will see in Illustrator. But there is an option called appearance of black, which once you said to be displayed accurately. So instead of display all blacks as rich black, you have the all blacks accurately turned on. You will be able to see these even on screen, so it won't just actually make a difference in print. There are several different variations on rich black, so you can make it a bit warmer or cooler depending how you balance the cyan, magenta, and yellow together with the black. But there's also one important thing, you shouldn't forget not to go over 300% with the total ink coverage. Because if you exceed that maximum ink coverage, that is a chance that not all of that ink will be absorbed properly by the paper. So you will end up having, again, blurry details or even stains. This is actually a feature you can find in in design. If you go to the Window menu under Output Separations Preview, you can choose to view the ink limit. But you can see that by default it is set to 300% But depending on the type of paper that you use, for instance, coated paper, you should actually go down to 280% Any areas highlighted in red in the design can potentially cause problems. Also, don't forget that you can test your designs for color blindness, both in Photoshop and Illustrator, by going into the view menu and under proof set up. Choose which type of color blindness you want to simulate. I'm going to use protenopia in this case, and then simply using the keyboard shorthad command or control y. I can toggle between the simulated color blindness view and the normal view. Here we can see that this green and magenta combination is definitely not going to work well. So people with that particular type of color blindness might not even see the word boot camp showing up here While being in this proof color setup. I can jump in here and maybe move this around a bit and find more contrast. Then jumping back, I can see the actual colors. If it looks good in both of these views, then it will most likely work in the other color blindness option as well. As long as there is enough contrast again there on the text and important elements, then you can carry on working with that selected color palette. 18. Text Alignment: That text would look much neater justified. Can you change it, please? One of the sentences that I'm really dreading as a designer, because every time I hear this from a client, I have to justify why I'm not using justification. So for instance here in this design, we have the same fold of this brochure. First set in left a line or flush left, and then we have it justified on the right. Yes, definitely, the shape of the text looks neater, but whether the readability or the reading experience is better is a completely different question. And as a graphic designer, one of the most important tasks that you have is to make sure that not only you create aesthetically pleasing designs, but also functional ones. And readability, just like legibility, is one of the most important functions for any design wherever there is type. To better understand this question, what I would like you to do is just consider looking at these two text frames as two solid shapes. So forget that this is text that you can read. Instead, imagine that this is just a texture, and when you look at it like that, we can immediately see that the left aligned version has a soft edge on the right and a hard edge on the left, while the justified text has hard edges on both sides. This makes it feel much more rigid compared to the other shape on the left, which can be a benefit as it makes feels more structured and organized, but it doesn't apply and work with every type of design. And to be honest, if you do your research properly, you would see that actually there's much more examples of left align text than justified, both in print and also on the web. Now one of the reasons why left or right align text is easier to read than justified is because it's easier to follow where you are currently in the text since each line is slightly different in length. Which means that when we are reading and reaching the end of a line jumping back, we will remember the previous line being longer. And it helps us orientating between the lines and make sure that we don't lose where we were. This is much harder to do with justified text because all the lines are the same in length. But there is another important difference which actually makes the justified text less organized. That's the difference in the spacing between the words, because some lines will end up having less words. And the only way the application can create the unified line length is by increasing the spacing between the words. This can lead to very unpleasant reverse or gaps within the copy which can be very distracting and confusing. While reading, while you are concentrating creating an aesthetically pleasing shape, With using justification, you end up creating these gaps, which makes the design actually more disorganized. In case you decide to use justification, there's a couple of additional features that you should pay attention to to improve the overall visual quality and flaw of your text. And to be able to demonstrate this to you, I'm going to set this text frame here on the left also to justify it. So at the moment they are identical, but we will be working on this one here on the right and we will introduce those improvements. So one of the things that I always recommend to use together with justification is hyphenation. And this is actually also another controversial thing which you would hear a lot of creative say, you shouldn't have hyphens in your text. However, this again, is not a general rule. It depends whether it will improve the overall quality of the text or not. Let's see if I introduce hyphenation, which you can do by pressing the shortcut command option shift H, or control Alt shift H on PC. Simply by introducing this already, the spacing between the words is getting better. This was before, and this is after. Just ever so slightly, we are getting a little bit more balanced spacing between the words. But there are a couple of issues that we introduced here. By default in designs, hyphenation is not the best because we will end up creating these short words, or short parts of words at the end of the lines when you have two characters on their own. It's not a good reading experience. To improve this, we can select the type tool by pressing on the keyboard. And go to the additional options by clicking on this icon here and choose hyphenation in this dialogue box. It's also worth turning on the preview option, just so you can see what you're doing. Normally, I like to increase this option after first to four letters, and immediately you can see that instead of having those short initial parts separated from the rest of the words, now we have minimum four characters visible at the end of each line. So this was before and this is after. And similarly, I also don't like to see the last two letters separated of words when I hyphenate. So this is again something I normally increase up to three with this first option. You can also control how long a word needs to be for it to be able to hyphenate. But for this, the default five letters is actually a good setting for larger amounts of text. There's also a really cool setting here with which you can quickly control whether you would like to see better spacing or fewer hyphens. For this, I'm just going to keep it in the middle and I'll click Okay. At the moment, we can't really see that much difference, but since we introduce hyphens, I don't want to forget another important option. This is something that's quite hidden away. You will find it under the type and table's story panel from the window menu. And it's a feature called optical margin alignment. Once you turn it on, the main thing that you will notice is that the hyphens are now aligned outside of the text frame. And since we are using justification, this is needed to make that line on the right even more straight. So when I turn it off, turn it back on, we will see that difference. I'm just going to deselect this frame and let's see again before and after. So as I said, it is very subtle, but it also works with quotation marks. So if this whole paragraph, for instance, was a quote, you will see that that quotation mark in the beginning is also outside of the frame. It's also called Roman hanging punctuation if you're interested in typographic terms. But we are not done yet because we still have to refine the most important settings for justification. Again, I use the type tool, having this text frame selected. And then go to the additional settings here on the right. And choose justification. Notice the keyboard shortcut for that, the three modifiers together with J. Once I select that, again, I am making sure that the preview is on. This is definitely one of those dialogue boxes that most designers don't really pay attention to, mainly because it's not so intuitive what we can achieve with it. But by tweaking these values slightly, you can greatly improve the quality of justified text. So for each of the three main settings here we have three separate values, the minimum desired, and maximum numbers. Let's start with letter spacing. By default in design is actually very strict, and it doesn't allow any letter spacing to happen when we are using justification. So that means that the tracking, or you can also call it kerning, is not affected at all. However, I actually like to tweak this, and by setting the minimum to minus two and the maximum to four, we give a little bit more levee for design to improve the balance or flaw of the text. If I turn off preview and turn it on, you can already see that this actually improved quite a lot in removing all of those gaps that we talked about. That was before and that is after. Not to mention that we are also reducing the amount of lines necessary for the text, which is always a good thing because you end up having more space to introduce other visual elements in the design. But let's not stop here, because we can also adjust the glyph scaling settings. Once again, this is a very strict setting by default, so we are not letting the characters to scale up and down at all with these current 100% values. But if I reduce the minimum to 98% and then the maximum to 102, then once again we introduced a tiny amount of tolerance for the characters to scale up and down whenever it's necessary. Which once again, ever so slightly, but further improves the flow of the text that was before and after. And finally, word spacing is going to also make a big difference in how we improve this text. So again, I like to be slightly more generous with these values, So instead of 80% being the minimum spacing, I will lower that down to 75% but I'm going to reduce the maximum amount. So instead of 133, I will be a bit more strict here and set this to 110. That means we won't allow the justification to introduce massive gaps. And instead of keeping the desired at 100% I will actually reduce this down to 90, or you can go even down to 85 if you want. By reducing the desired amount, you will definitely keep the spacing tighter. But it is important to mention that these settings work quite well with the specific font that I'm using here and also the size for the text. However, in other cases, you might need to tweak these values again slightly differently. But the general idea is the same, that instead of using the default justification values, we tweak it and improve it. And by doing that, we are improving the general flow of the text and it is just looking much more professional. Let's just click okay to accept these changes. And there's one final piece of the puzzle that's also very important to mention, which is the composer setting for your paragraphs. Now by default, this is again a setting that you can find here in the additional options, it is always set to the Adobe paragraph Composer. While there is another useful option called Adobe single line Composer. So let me show you what's the difference here. If for instance, I would like this word on to be already together with the other words, in the next line, I could add a soft break or soft return here using shift enter. But by doing that, notice how not only the lines underneath are going to all change, but even some of the lines before it will adjust themselves. This is because we have the paragraph composer on by default. But if I undo this change and I have the whole text frame selected using the type tool, I select single line composer. Now this already adjusts the text slightly, and if I now come in here and maybe want to move this word to the next line, again using soft break. As I'm doing that, notice that nothing else is changing apart from the very next line. So I have much more control over what's happening throughout this text frame, which I would recommend for smaller amounts of text like this one. But I probably would still keep using the paragraph composer for larger amounts of text, like in a book, or a catalog, or even in a magazine. And finally, just to circle back to our original text frame here, if I set this back to left aligned, there's of course, also a couple of ways you can improve the quality of text using this alignment. So while for justification I recommend using hyphens here, I don't think it's necessary to introduce them unless you have a very narrow measure or line length, which I can demonstrate easily if I just drag this in. Maybe you have text set like this, or maybe even a bit further out by introducing hyphens. You can see how it will refine the edge on the right and it will make it less ragged. There will be less of the zig zags here on the right. Once again, introducing hyphens improves it, but if you have enough measure or line length, I don't think hyphens are necessary for left or right aligned text. Instead, what you should do is again from the additional settings to choose the balance Reggie lines option. Which will result again in a slightly more refined edge on the right side that was before and this is after. To summarize, all kinds of alignments could work and you shouldn't restrict yourself using either one of them just because someone told you not to work with them. As a general rule of thumb, I would say justification is great when you have a lot of texts, like in newspapers, and you have to really condense all that text, so you would have columns very close to each other. In these cases, justification helps to create those imaginary boundaries between the columns, making sure that readers don't jump or crossover between them by accident. While in magazines where you can afford to have a little bit more space or gutter between your columns, it might already look better if you're using left align text. 19. Useful Keyboard Shortcuts: I have this spread here, which I created specifically for this tutorial, and I'm going to zoom a little bit closer so you can see exactly what I'm doing. By the way, I will be switching back and forth between layout or normal and print view. That's the keyboard shortcut in design. Most of the time I'm going to spend in design because this is the application that has the most typographic keyboard shortcuts, even though most of them will also apply to Photoshop and Illustrator. So now that we zoom closer, I just double click, first of all, to get into editing the type. Whatever tool you have, like the selection tool, if you just double click on a text frame, you get into editing the type. And then the first shortcut I like to use in most applications is the jump between words, which would be command left and right arrows. That's very handy. And with this, you can very quickly get to the next word in your copy. It's much faster than press and holding down just simply the left and right arrows, or switching to the mouse and then clicking. These shortcuts are especially useful when you are typing because you don't have to let go the keyboard. You can just do everything without touching the mouse. Now if you want to also select words while jumping between them, just hold down also the shift key command. Shift left and right arrows. We'll be able to select in whichever direction you want by words. Each time I press the arrows, while holding down command and shift, I can select words ahead or behind the position of the cursor. Similarly to this, you can also jump to the end or the beginning of your currently selected line. That's the end. And the home buttons, you can see my cursor jumping from one end to the other. Once again, if you hold down the shift key, you can do the same thing. For example, if I put my cursor here in the middle, I can use shift key to select the second half of the line. Or go back there and use shift home key to select the first part of it. If you use shift up and down arrows, you can quickly select full lines going either down or up. If you want to jump to the beginning of a paragraph, use command up and down arrows. You can see how the cursor is jumping between these three paragraphs. Now it's a little bit more visible what's happening there. Similarly before, if you hold down the shift key together with this command shift up and down arrows, you can very quickly select full paragraphs or de select them. The shortcut works back and forth. Now of course, you can also select all text within a frame. That would be command A. Or if you want to quickly de select all of it, that's command shift A. You might prefer to use the mouse. Even though this tutorial is about keyboard shortcuts, there's actually a couple of things you can do with the mouse which can help you to select text quickly. Double clicking would select a word, triple click will select a line, quadruple click four times, clicking selects a paragraph. If you're crazy about clicking, you can also click five times in a row to select all the text within text frame or the whole story, 12345. And that will select the whole story. Now it is worth mentioning that for design, you actually have a separate story editor or text editor. And that's again, useful shortcut whenever you're working with text. Let's say I have a word selected here. If I press command Y, it opens up the story editor. And not only that, but it also keeps my selection visible. Similarly, if I select something here and press command Y again, it jumps back to my layout view keeps the selection there once more. The cool thing about the story editor is that it will even be able to show you the overset text. Here you can see I just reduce the size of my frame. If I now press command Y, I can see not only the text that's currently visible in layout view, but also the text that's overset. It's indicated here at the bottom with this red outline. In layout view, you only see the little red Cross at the bottom right corner, which is called the output point of your text frame. Another handy shortcut, if you quickly want to see all the text, just double click at the bottom center point of your frame. A came back. Now that we covered the basic shortcuts for navigating and selecting text, let's move on to formatting text. Now. The first 1.1 of the most obvious ones is to change the style of your text. This phone, for example, Monserra supports lots of different variations. Now currently you can see that I'm using semibald, but to quickly reset it back to regular, and that's one of my favorite shortcuts is command shift y. Whatever phone you have will always set back to regular clears. Any additional formatting if you want to add, let's say bold, just use command shift B. Command shift I would be italic, which also preserves the original bold. Now you are adding these additional formatting. This is bold, italic. If you want to also add underline, that would be command shift U. Now we have three additional formatting on top of the original regular style. Once again, if I use command shift y, it resets everything and just keeps the original regular formatting. Similarly to these shortcuts, you will also have to hold down command shift, but use other keys to change the alignment. So let's say in this paragraph I currently have left a line or flush left. If I want to change it to right, I would use command shift R. Command shift L would be left, R would be right would be center, and j would be justified. Now if you have a little bit less text, I'm just going to delete slightly from this text here. You can see even when the last line normally is kept left aligned, that's when you use command shift J. This is how it looks. But if you use command shift that will force the last line also to be fully justified. Command shift J, command shift. Then if I want to go back to flush left, it's again command shift L. Now of course you can also change the font quickly with a shortcut in design. That would be command 61 thing is worth mentioning with this shortcut. And you probably noticed that the control bar on the top appears by default. This is hidden away since the latest update in CC 2019, mainly because the properties panel here on the right was introduced. It serves pretty much the same purpose as the control bar but in a little bit more refined way. So if you don't want to see the control bar, I don't advise to use this shortcut because it will keep bringing it up and you can't just get rid of it with a shortcut. You have to actually go to the window menu and turn of control. But if you prefer to have the control bar open, feel free to use command six to quickly select the font selector on the left. And then you can just start typing the name of a font. Let's say bus. I just start typing that and then I choose maybe the regular. And there you go. We quickly change the font. Now once again, if I have it selected, I can just press command six, type the same phone that we had, Montserrat, and I will just select Bold. Again, it's up to you whether you prefer to have the control bar open or not. I am going to keep it closed and just simply use the property panel on the right. Hopefully this shortcut in the future will be updated to work with the properties panel as well. Now let's move on to something very important, and that's to change the size of the font or the text that you select. For example, here I'm going to select the main word or title traveling. And I'm going to just double click on the word to select it. Now to change the size, it's command shift. And then the less than, greater than signs or full stop and comma. I prefer to remember it as less than, greater than sizes because that's how I'm changing the size so it's getting smaller or bigger. This is really useful because you can very quickly change the tax size on your current selection without changing the tax frame. But if you want to make this faster, you can also add the option key and then it will go much faster so it's a higher increment that you're using. I think it's doing it five times faster. So let's just see once again, when I'm by default using the shortcut, it goes two points at a time. If I hold down the old key, it goes ten points at a time. But if you want to change increment, you can go to the preferences in in design here under units and increments, you can actually specify the shortcut. Whenever you use decrease or increase size shortcuts. This is the increment that will be used. The default is two points, but you can set it to whatever you want. The same setting will also be applied to changing leading, which I'm going to show you in a second. But while we are here, you can see there's a couple of additional things that you can specify if you're planning to use more shortcuts to work with type I highly recommend to check these settings out to move on. Let's talk about a couple of shortcuts to change the case of your text. Now this will only work if you have the original text written with lower case or center case. If you typed with caps, lock on. For example, like this text here. It's not going to work. You have to make sure you type in normally. And then that text you will be able to set to all caps. For example, by using command shift K. The same shortcut will work back and forth. So you can switch to lower case or sentence case, for example, like that. Again, I can switch back and forth between by using command shift K. It works in Photoshop as well. Unfortunately, the same shortcut by default doesn't work in Illustrator. But you can customize the shortcuts, and then it will also be universal. And you can use it in all of these applications. If you ever need to customize shortcuts, you will find that under the edit menu keyboard shortcuts. So all the DOB applications has this feature and you can fully customize everything. Now similarly to all caps, you can also use small caps. That's command shift H. And you can see the difference between a normal cap and a small cap character. Again, it's a togl. You can switch back and forth again. Command shift H is the shortcut. Then with command shift plus sign, you can turn your text into superscript or command option shift plus you can turn it into a subscript. When is that useful? For example, if you want to add an index number, you just select it and then command shift plus sign. Another handy shortcut to remember is check spelling. For example, here I have a word that I spelled wrong intentionally. By the way, the rest of the text is just using the placeholder copy. Don't try to read it, it doesn't really make much sense. But if I use command I, I can quickly get the check spelling option for the selected text. It can be a single word or it can be also full text frame. But in this case I can see already the suggested corrections journey. That's what I wanted to use. I can just say change and you can see it's updated and now I can just say done. That's a very quick and useful way of checking your spelling while you are working in these applications. That's what we had time for in this first video. So these were more like basic shortcuts. The next part, I'm going to cover more advanced shortcut techniques, again for working with type. If you want to learn more in general about in Design Illustrator and Photoshop, I highly recommend to check out our master classes where I go into weigh more detail in everything, not just on type, but pretty much everything else that matters if you want to work professionally and efficiently with these Adobe applications. 20. Additional Keyboard Shortcuts: We are back in in design for the second part of this tutorial. And this time we will also use a bit of Photoshop because there's a couple of specific shortcuts that you can only present there without any further delay. Let's get started with a very useful shortcut and that's for changing the leading in our text. If I select a paragraph, let's just say this one here. I can use this shortcut very quickly. It's option up and down a row to change the leading. This is changing with the same increment as the size change which was in the previous part. These are all in the preferences on the units and increments, so you can find the option here, Alt up and down arrow by default changes the leading or the space between your lines by two points. But if you want to increase the speed at which you change the leading, you can hold down the command key and together command option up and down arrow will change the leading with ten point increments. There is also a shortcut for resetting the leading, which I find very useful now. Whenever I say resetting, it means turning it back to the automatic setting. Anytime you use text, there will be always an auto leading option. You can find here on the right side in the property S panel as well. So that's the auto option. This is always based on the size of your characters, but the shortcut is command option shift. It's a bit complicated shortcut but I recommend to get used to it because it can save you a lot of time. Now similarly to leading, we have a shortcut for kerning or tracking. Now we call it kerning when it's applied to, let's say, a single word. So in this case, for example, if I use the option left and right arrows, I can do the kerning between A and V, for example. We can get a little bit narrower space between R and we can just give a little bit more space. And, and G can get closer as well. Something like that visually looks a bit more balanced. This is what we call kerning. But if you are using the same shortcut and you apply it on a whole paragraph like this and you use option left and right arrow. This is what we normally would call tracking. This can be a very useful technique and shortcut to make more space. If you need to squeeze in more text into a text frame, you can always reduce the tracking. Just try to avoid squeezing it too far because it will be hard to read, so you don't want to ruin the eligibility of your text. And similarly to leading, this is also something you can track here in the properties panel or in the control bar. So this is the value for tracking, and if you see anything but zero, that means that you changed it. So it's a custom value. If you want to set it back to the default values, just set it to zero. Just the way we've done it with leading ning or tracking can also be sped up by holding down the command key together with the option key command option, left and right arrows will be five times faster ning or tracking. Because ning and tracking is so important, there's even a shortcut for adjusting specifically the spacing between words. Without changing the distance between the characters inside the word, you can just specifically adjust the spaces. This is by holding down the option key and command backward slash to increase the spaces. You can see when I'm doing this, the space is only increase between the words but not inside the words. If I use the same modifiers command option but with backspace, then I can reduce the spacing between the words. This is curing or tracking specifically for the spaces between words in your selected text. This is definitely one of the less known shortcuts, but it is an extremely useful one. Highly recommend to keep it in mind and practice using it. You will remember it. Now there's another shortcut which is almost like leading, but it can be used on specific words or characters. And it's called baseline shift. I can show you on a selected word, let's say this one here. And all you have to do is to hold down option shift and then use up and down arrows. Basically what's happening is on the selected text, you can shift the baseline. Remember once again, in the preferences, on the units and increments. This actually has its own value that you can specify. If you want to be a bit more subtle with this, you can set the increment to one point or even half a point, and that will be slower when you are adjusting it. You want to see baseline shift value here in the properties panel. By default, you have to click on these more options to be able to see it. So this is the baseline shift again. It can be set back to zero quickly and easily. Hyphenation is another shortcut that I use very often. This can only be applied to a full paragraph, even if you have a single word selected, it will be applied to your currently selected paragraph. This is command option shift H. Now you will see that we get a few hyphens here in the paragraph with the same shortcut. I can also get rid of them. Hyphenation on and hyphenation off. These are the things that obviously are best to be saved into a style, a paragraph style like here. In the style that I use for paragraphs, I would specify that I don't want to use hyphens if we are working in normal view. Pressing W, you can switch between normal and print views. When you are in the normal view, you can use another shortcut. It's command option to show the hidden characters. This can be very useful to spot end of paragraphs or special characters or like anchored details. But it can also get in the way when you don't need it. That's why it's worth remembering the shortcut to hide them and show them again. Now since you are learning Adobe Applications, one shortcut you must know about. And that is the Space Bar, which is the same in all the Adobe applications. It's for penning. Whenever you hold down the Space Bar, you can click and drag, then pen around. Now what happens if you have text selected and hold down the space bar? Well, it's going to get rid of the text and it replaces it with a space character. If you want to avoid that, even while having text selected or while typing, you can still do penning. The only thing you have to do is to instead use the option key. Holding down the option key while editing text, you can still do penning, which is brilliant. This is a shortcut, definitely worth remembering. Now here's a few shortcuts. Specifically when you work with text frames in design. One of them is how you define the selected colors. For this, I'm just going to open quickly the control panel as well. Control bar, which we can see here on the top. By default, when I select a tax frame, you will see that the colors here are both empty. And that is because the frame colors are visible there. The field color of the frame and the stroke color of the frame. Just so we can see what's happening, If I apply a blue stroke color, we can see that's going to appear around the frame. But what if I want to quickly change the color of all the copy within this tax frame? For that there is a very useful shortcut. It's simply pressing J on the keyboard can switch to showing the colors of the text inside the frame. Believe me, this is a huge time saver. This is something you will be doing all the time. In, in design, you would have to switch between selecting the frame attributes or selecting the text inside the frame. J is switching between the frame attributes and then the text attributes. There's actually four switches. Normally, when you work in, in design, two for the frame and two for the text, both of them will have a feel and stroke. The one that you will be using the least is the stroke around the text. The J shortcut to switch between These is extremely useful. Now if you learn to use these, it's also worth mentioning that here in the toolbar, you see always whether the stroke where the field color is currently selected. These are also something that you can switch by pressing X on the keyboard. Whichever comes on top is the one that's going to be selected. Now the stroke is selected, now the field is selected. If I press J, I can see now the field color of the text is selected. Now the stroke color of the text is selected. Again just by pressing X, X, and J. Very useful options for the frame colors. There's an additional shortcut. It's shift X, swap the two attributes, the field color becomes a stroke color, and vice versa. With shift X, I can do this switch very quickly and easily. One last shortcut for changing colors, and that is the question mark, or forward with which you can set the currently selected color to none. It's basically removing the stroke color in this case when I press it. Maybe one last shortcut here is D to quickly set the forward colors, which would be black stroke and no field since we added stroke around the text frame. I would like to also point out that whenever you do this, you probably want to go into the text frame options, so it's from object text frame options or command B. Another useful shortcut. And there you can choose the inset spacing to increase the distance between the text and the outline of your text frame. Whenever you use strokes, this is obviously a much better way of formatting your text frame. In the previous part, we talked about the story editor, which is a great feature within in design to make it easier to work with text in general and that's the story editor. Now you might recall the shortcut for that was command Y. With this, whichever frame you have selected, you get a separate little text editor window there you can make changes to your text. And one thing that is different between the story editor and the normal layout view is that here, by default you can select text, let's say this sentence here, and drag and drop it anywhere else within the text. If I need to move this further down, you can see I could simply drag and drop it. If I press command Y, I can switch back and I can see now the text is updated. The third paragraph is now bigger because we just moved a sentence in there. But this is something you can only do in the story editor. By default, however, you can actually find a setting to change that. And enable it in the layout view as well. If you like dragon dropping text, all you have to do is to go to preferences. By the way, I'm just using the command K shortcut. Every time I go to the preferences and the feature for this is the type, and there you have the dragon drop text editing feature. If you enable it in the layout view, then you will be able to select text, let's say this one here. And I can now drop it and put it above the other bullet point or any word. For example, I select this one and I can just drop it elsewhere. The reason why it is not enabled by default because sometimes you can accidentally move things around. It's up to you whether you like it or not. I normally prefer to keep it off and if I want to do dragon drop editing, I just go into the story editor. So it can be a little bit more intentional there then having it on all the time in layout view. Now if you're like me and you work with paragraph styles all the time, then you can also assign shortcuts to them to make it easier and faster to apply them. For example, here I have two styles, one for the title and one for the heading. But I can switch between these easily by either using the paragraph styles panel, so I can click on Heading, click back on Title, and do the same thing here as well. Obviously, there's just not enough space for it to show it. But the other more efficient way is to set up shortcuts for these styles. The way you do that is by right clicking on a style definition here in the panel and choose Edit. Then you will find a shortcut option here in this dialog box. Now there is a restriction on what keys you can use. You have to hold down the option key and then one of the numbers from the numeric keypad. This will only work if you have a bigger keyboard. On the smaller keyboards. Unfortunately, it's a bit more tricky to access these keys, the numeric keyboard area. Let's say number one, number one, the way it's referred to that character, option number one. I'm going to click okay. Then for the title I'm going to write click Edit. And I can use again, option zero, let's say. Okay. Now if I set like this one with option one and option zero, I can very quickly switch back and forth between these two styles. How cool is that? Of course, you can assign shortcuts to everything and you can even keep track of them. Here in the paragraph styles panel, you will see the shortcuts assigned. Normally, you wouldn't have more than, let's say, ten paragraph styles in the document that can be easily covered. The shortcuts if you want to, but if you don't want to spend time in setting up the style shortcuts, you can also use. Another brilliant feature in design is called quick apply. Let's just say I'm going to again select this text. Here I press command Return, which brings up the quick apply dialogue box. And here I can just type in heading. And you see after typing the first few characters, it already shows me the style and I just have to press return again. Once again, Command return. I can type in, let's say title back to title. I actually have two styles called the same, but I'm going to use the one that I had here originally. Quick Apply by the way, can be used for all kinds of things in, in design. This is just one of many uses. But you can actually find all the features hidden away somewhere in the design. As long as you know the name, you can type it into quick apply, and it will appear straight away without you looking for it in the menu. A good example for that would be maybe the current page number marker, which is really hidden away under the type menu. In special character markers, current page number, there you go. Instead of looking for it, I could just say Command Enter and type in current. And you can already see it tells me exactly where it is. If I increase the size of this window, I can see where I can find it. Or I can just simply press Enter and it will add the current page number marker in there for me. Now there's also another fairly advanced keyboard shortcut method for quickly changing or updating words in your document. This is like a find and replace, but without leaving the selected text and without going into any dialogue box. Of course we can use command, which is the shortcut to get to the fine change dialogue box. But without going in there, you can actually achieve simple changes quickly by doing the following three steps. This is probably the most complicated one to remember, but I use it quite often, so I'm going to show it to you. Let's say I want to change the word, trip to journey. And you can see we have a few instances of that word within this story here on the left, what I need to do first is to mark the word I want to replace. Once I have selected trip, I can press Shift one for this. If you want to use the function keys, you also have to make sure that they act as normal function keys. On Mac. That's something you need to do in the system preferences. You just need to go to keyboard and here you have to make sure you enable this feature. Use function keys as standard function keys. Once you have that, just press shift F one, which will mark the word or jump to the next instance. You can actually use this shift F one to go through and see how many times you have that word appearing in your currently serected text frame. The second step is to mark the word that you want to use for replacing it. Let's say I'm going to type in here somewhere, Journey, journey. And I double click on it. And I'm going to use command F two. Command F two, that's the word that I'm going to use to replace the word trip. Now I just have to press shift F three a couple of times to replace all the words. But I can actually see the changes one by one on my screen. When I press shift F three, the first one is going to be highlighted, then replace. Then if I keep pressing these shortcuts, it's going to keep replacing it, as you can see. And then at the end, it just says the search is completed, which means all of the instances of the word trip are now replaced to journey. As I said, it's a little bit of a difficult shortcut to remember. But if you practice it and do it a couple of times, you will remember it and it will save you a lot of time. If you need to specify more than just simply replacing words, remember to use the fine change dialog box which was once again command. To wrap up this video, I have two more bonus shortcuts in Photoshop. I'm just going to switch there quickly. By the way, this work was created for our podcast. If you haven't listened to it already, you can find it on our website. Just go to Yes imadesign.com and on the top, you will find a section for podcast. You can listen to it on our site. There is an embedded player there. Or you can also find us on Spotify, itunes and Amazon as well. To move back to the shortcuts I wanted to mention. First one is when you have text selected in Photoshop and you want to start a new tax layer, all you have to do is to hold down the shift key and click somewhere else. You see that starts to create a new tax layer with a recent update in Photoshop. Whenever you do this, it will also automatically add two words, loam ipsum into your tax layer. It doesn't start completely blank, but this is a really cool feature. If you want to accept typing, you just have to press Escape. The first time you do this, Photoshop is going to ask you whether you want to use it to cancel or commit to the changes. I like to use the cape for committing changes. I recommend to set it that way. Finally, another technique, if you want to create a paragraph to a certain size, you can use the option key it, the type tool. Click once and type the values in. Here you can, let's say type in 200 by 200. And there you go. It creates a frame exactly to that size. 21. Conclusion: Congratulations on completing this course of the graphic design theory series. I hope you found it useful and inspiring. Don't forget to go through the glossary of terms, PDF, review everything we covered, and if you feel ready, take the quiz to test your knowledge. Come back any time to the references on the Miller Not Boards we use in this course to help you remember the things we talked about or to find inspiration for your next design project. Please let us know if you felt there was anything missing from this course or if you have any suggestions on how we can improve it. E mail us at Info at Sm Designer.com and we will get back to you as soon as possible. We really appreciate your input and help. Now it's time for you to pick your next topic and dive into another graphic design theory course. Remember, there is no right or wrong order to complete this series. All the rules we cover are equally important and everything is related. But what is most important is getting a good understanding of these rules and applying them in your projects. I'm sure you will use what you've learned to create something amazing, and I cannot wait to see it.