Typography 1

Hello everyone. Before we start today, I would like to show you two pictures.

When I first saw that  shop sign, I found it hard to read it, even a 'mousewritting' one is much easier to read than the shop sign with different colors and all capital words. As we see the shop sign on top, we can find the words are all capital, the respective size of alphabet in a word has different size and color. Hence, it's very hard to verify the word at the first look since we actually recognize the word by memorizing it's 'shape'. Because we still generally convey some information by using texts, the importance of how the words looks like is crucial. That's why we need typography(字體排印學).

It's not difficult to see that the purpose of typography is to make written language(書面語) readable and appealing by arranging the type. There are some tips to let you know how and when to do some arrangement in order to make your layout look more comfortable. I'll mention one today and leave the rest to the next week.


-Size of fonts & space between letters-

Size of fonts often decides which one would be notice first or be emphasized. Just like the topic of the picture above. It's easy to see "The 10 commandments of typography" with the first look. Notice that because the words are all capital so the space between every letter is wider than usual. This can make us easier to read through the topic. So next time when you have a sentence with all capital letter. Remember to modify the space between letter to let it more readable.

As an example, it's much easier to know what my dinner was tonight with the second picture above.


Next time, we'll talk about serif and sans-serif fonts. If you're interest with my silly sentence or my stupid sentence, welcome to my blog next week!