creating a structure

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as it could. Should you just move on for the sake of the design and let the text sit awkwardly? No! The needs of the text should always come first. It doesn’t matter if you did something that you’re attached to; go back and rework the design until it both looks good and properly suits the needs of the text itself.

Make sure you’re keeping an eye on kerning.

Even if you are working with some of the best fonts out there, they are going to require fine tuning in the design process. Pay attention to the little details as you go, and see where you can adjust the kerning to sit properly. Bringhurst tells us specifically that “there is no such thing as a font whose kerning cannot be improved.”

You should also be checking the kerning of the word space! White space is just as important as actual text in terms of how much they both contribute to the page design. Some letters may have awkward kerning near certain letters, such as the lowercase f. So, it is best to double check these things before moving on.

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do your research 10

Don’t rip the font you want off of some random website. When you finally decide what font or fonts you want to incorporate in your project, you should make sure you go about obtaining that font properly. Over the course of time, so many versions have been ripped off or even edited to differ from the original purposefully. Both of these things lead to the font being warped: it might not come with all of the properties it was originally designed to have, and that’s the opposite of what you want.

If you want the guarantee that you’re working with the font exactly as the designer intended, work with a licensed version of the font. This ensures that there won’t be any alterations that will impact your experience in using it, and it also ensures that you will be supporting the original creator, if they are still alive.

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1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 do your research

Fully research the background of a font before using it.

Fonts do not exist in a vacuum. They are meticulously crafted by someone, sometimes multiple people, and you should consider this heavily when scrolling through the thousands of options available today. Typefaces can grow to have different meanings that differ from the original intentions of the designer, or the designer themselves can have a dark history that you may not want to be supporting through using their font.

Blackletter fonts as a whole should be used with caution. During WWII, the Nazis used blackletter fonts constantly in their propaganda, and this should be considered if you think you want to use it in your work. Blackletter was and still is symbolic of supporting Nazis, depending on the context it is used in.

Lithos and Neuland, two inscriptional/calligraphic capitals, have long histories of stereotyping African-Americans. Despite this, they are still commonly used today. I would suggest avoiding them altogether and to never use any typeface that has a history of racism. Double Prime: A mark that looks like this, ‘’, which signifies inches. Be aware of accidentally using this in place of quotation marks.

Ligatures: Two or more characters are combined into a glyph to appear as though the individual letters are connected. See ff, ffi, ffl, fj, ffj

Baseline: The line which all letters rest on, but which is passed by letters p and q.

Blind Folio: A page that is accounted for in the numbered pages, but which has no visible folio on the actual page.

Color: The overall sense of color achieved by the page com-

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glossary

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