Typography

Typography can be thought of as using typefaces and fonts to make our documents and presentations more attractive. Effective use of typography requires balancing our goal of improved aesthetics with the practical goals of readability and professionalism.

A typeface is a named set of characters that share a common style, such as Times New Roman or Arial. A font is a particular style of a typeface, such as Times New Roman Bold or Arial Italic.

Typefaces can be divided into two broad categories: Serif and Sans-Serif. A serif is decorative styling on the characters of a typeface, and typefaces without these decorations are called sans-serif - meaning without-serif.

For example, Times New Roman and Garamond are serif typefaces, where Helvetica and Arial are sans-serif typefaces. One way to tell the difference is by looking at the capital letter I, which in serif typefaces has small decorations on either side of the top and bottom of the letter, where in a sans-serif typeface, the capital I looks like a straight vertical line. In most document editors, when you select these typefaces you are given the choice of a normal font, a bold font, an italic font, or a bold-italic font.

Primarily, the job of a font is to enable someone to read text, and if a font is too small, it will be impossible to read. Font size is usually specified in points or pixels, and fonts that are below 10 points or 16 pixels are typically considered too small to be legible by a wide audience, so it is best to keep your font size at or above 10 points or 16 pixels.

Every computer operating system has fonts preinstalled, but fonts installed on one operating system may not be installed on another. In other words, fonts that come pre-installed on a Windows machine are not the same that come preinstalled on a Mac, but there are a few fonts that are common between them.

For example, on both Windows and Mac computers - as well as most other devices - you can be confident that you will find Times New Roman as it is one of the most widely used serif typefaces, and Arial, one of the most widely used sans-serif typefaces. Knowing that these fonts are universally installed on just about any device, when you use them in your documents you know that no matter where someone opens your document, your document will look the same.

However, if you use a font other than Times New Roman or Arial, and the person opening your document does not have that font installed, they may see a default font in its place, making the document look different, and in some cases, quite a bit less attractive than you intended.

For example, if you created a Word document on a Mac that used the Helvetica Neue typeface, if someone opened that document on a Windows PC, instead of Helvetica Neue they would see Times New Roman, as Helvetica Neue is only available on the Mac.

Fortunately, the Adobe PDF document format solves this problem for us, as it bundles fonts with the document such that they don't have to be installed on someone's device. This ensures that your document looks the same no matter what device it is viewed on, as well as ensuring that if printed, the document looks the same no matter the printer.

The drawback of the PDF format is that PDFs are not intended for editing - though they can be edited with the Adobe Acrobat application. PDFs are usually only used for publication, so if you need people to edit your document you should not send them a PDF. However, if you want to preserve your font choices and prefer for your document not to be edited, then using the PDF document format gives us the advantage of being able to use whatever font we like.

The question then is, which fonts should we choose?

There's a constellation of fonts to choose from as artists are constantly designing and publishing new typefaces. The fonts already installed on your device are only a fraction of what is available, but if you would like to find fonts not already installed on your device, two sites that can be very helpful are fonts.google.com and fonts.adobe.com.

To help narrow down your options, for professional usage you should avoid highly stylized typefaces - such as those that emulate handwriting - and stick to typefaces that are simpler and less artistic. There will still be a wide array of choices, often with only very subtle differences distinguishing one typeface from the next.

When utilizing fonts in your document, the key is to create a contrast between text that serves different purposes, such as our title, headings, and body text.

For example, if you were making a document in Microsoft Word on Windows - where the default typeface is Calibri - if your title was 11-point Calibri normal, and your headings were 11-point Calibri normal, and your body text was 11-point Calibri normal, then your typography would lack contrast, and therefore look very dull and may even be difficult for people to read, as there would be no typographic differences that indicated the start of different sections.

To add contrast, we might make the title 48-point Calibri bold, top-level headings 28-point Calibri bold, secondary headings 20-point Calibri normal, and body text 11-point Calibri normal. To add even more contrast, we could use 3 different typefaces: one for the title, one for the headings, and one for the body text; but care should be taken to choose typefaces whose styles complement each other.

Knowing which typefaces complement each other, however, is its own artistic skill typically learned as a part of an education in graphic design. Without such an education, it may be best to stick to the default settings for titles, headings, and body text selected for you in your document editor, and to get variety in font choices, you may be able to switch to different built-in design templates, which will make the complementary font choices for you.

Beyond selecting size and font, we can create contrast by adjusting the whitespace in our typography. This is done by adjusting the space between lines - called leading - as well as the space between characters - called kerning. By increasing the whitespace separating characters and lines, we can create dramatic differences, such as changing a document from looking tight and cramped to light and airy.

However you choose to utilize typography, never forget that the goal is to improve aesthetics without sacrificing practicality. Whatever fonts we choose, and how we decide to use them, our documents and presentations should always be easy to read and look like professional business documents. If ever you feel you have gone too far, and your document is looking more like a piece of abstract art than something you would send to professional colleagues, it might be best to back out of your typographical choices and instead rely on your document editor's default settings.