Decode typography terminology, understand your designers, and empower your brand with our essential glossary
October 24, 2024
Effective communication is essential, and typography is a leading character ('scuse the pun). While the right typographic choices can shape your brand's perception, unfamiliar terms from your designer might leave you feeling more than just a little lost. According to Grammarly’s 2024 State of Business Communication report, people spend about 88% of their workweek communicating, highlighting how crucial strong communication strategies are for effective collaboration. With this glossary (Design Glossary Terms: Typography), we're going to clarify typography, helping you understand the key terms that matter most. By familiarising yourself with these words, you'll not only enhance your conversations with your design team but also make informed decisions about your brand’s visual identity.
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Design Glossary Terms: Typography
Alignment
Alignment in typography refers to the positioning of text in relation to the page or container. Text can be aligned to the left, right, center, or justified, creating different visual effects and impacting the flow and readability of the content.
Ascender
An ascender is the part of a lowercase letter that extends above the height of the letter "x" (the x-height). Examples of letters with ascenders include "b," "d," and "h." Ascenders affect the overall vertical spacing and legibility of text.
Baseline
A baseline is the invisible line upon which most letters sit. It helps maintain consistent alignment of text in a design, ensuring all characters line up evenly. Adjusting the baseline is crucial for creating balance and readability in typography.
Cap Height
Cap height refers to the height of capital letters in a typeface and is measured from the baseline. This measurement impacts the overall proportion and appearance of type, affecting how large or small uppercase letters appear in relation to the rest of the text.
Condensed
A condensed font has letters that are close together, sometimes it will feature as part of a family that contains standard and extended versions. It allows more characters to fit in a given space and can make the font appear more vertical. You may also hear it referred to as "compressed" or "narrow" in some font families.
Descender
A descender is the portion of a lowercase letter that extends below the baseline, like the tails of "g," "p," and "y." Properly managing descenders is important for maintaining readability, especially in lines of text where letters may overlap.
Diacritic
A diacritic is a mark added to a letter to indicate a change in pronunciation, such as accents (é) or umlauts (ö). These marks are essential in languages that require phonetic distinction and influence the overall design of a typeface.
Display Font
Display fonts are designed for use in large sizes, such as headlines, posters, or advertisements. They are often bold, decorative, or unconventional, grabbing attention and setting the tone of the design but not suitable for body text.
Drop Cap
A drop cap is a large initial letter that drops down into several lines of text, typically used at the beginning of a paragraph or section. It adds a decorative touch and draws attention to the start of the content.
Extended
An extended font is wider than the regular version of the typeface. It gives more breathing room between letters, often creating a bold, spacious look. Extended fonts are typically used for display text or headlines where a dramatic effect is desired. You may also hear this be referred to as a "wide" and is the opposite to a condensed font.
Finial
A finial is the tapered, rounded end of a letter’s stroke, commonly seen in letters like "e" or "c." Finials are subtle design elements that give a typeface its unique style and help soften the appearance of characters.
Font
A font refers to a set of characters with a specific style, size, and weight within a typeface family. It determines the visual appearance of text, including its shape, thickness, and decorative elements.
Geometric Font
Geometric fonts are typefaces constructed from simple shapes, like circles and squares, creating a clean, modern look. They often have uniform letterforms and are widely used in branding and minimalistic designs to convey precision and simplicity.
Glyph
A glyph is an individual character in a typeface, including letters, numbers, punctuation marks, or symbols. Each glyph represents a unique visual representation of a character in a particular font or style.
Ink Trap
An ink trap is a design feature in some typefaces where extra space is added at the junctions or corners of characters. This helps prevent ink from spreading and blurring details when printed at small sizes or on rough paper, improving legibility in print.
Italic
Italic is a style of font where the characters are slanted, often used to emphasise text or distinguish it from the rest of the content. It originated from handwritten scripts and adds a dynamic, flowing appearance to the text.
Justification
Justification aligns text to both the left and right margins, creating clean, vertical edges on both sides of a column. It often requires adjustments to word spacing and hyphenation to avoid awkward gaps or stretched text.
Kerning
Kerning is the adjustment of space between individual characters in a font to create visually pleasing and consistent spacing. Proper kerning enhances readability and ensures that letters don’t feel too cramped or too spread out within words.
Leading
Leading is the vertical space between lines of text, named after the strips of lead used in traditional typesetting. Adjusting leading improves readability by preventing lines of text from appearing too close together or too far apart.
Ligature
Ligatures are special characters created by combining two or more letters into a single glyph. Common ligatures include combinations like "fi", "ff' and "fl." Ligatures improve readability by preventing awkward spacing between certain letter pairs.
Lorem Ipsum
Lorem Ipsum is a placeholder text commonly used in the design and typesetting industry. It consists of Latin-like words and phrases that have no real meaning, serving as a temporary filler for visualising the layout of a document or website.
Monospaced Font
A monospaced font is a typeface in which each character takes up the same amount of horizontal space. Unlike proportional fonts, where characters vary in width, monospaced fonts create a uniform, grid-like appearance, often used in coding or technical documents.
Orphan
An orphan in typography is defined as a line of text that stands alone at the beginning or end of a column, separated from the rest of its paragraph. This separation can lead to confusion and disrupt the reader's experience.
Overhang
Overhang refers to the parts of a character that extend slightly beyond its baseline or cap height, such as the curve of an "o" or the tail of a "y." This subtle feature prevents the character from appearing unbalanced or misaligned.
Point Size
Point size measures a font's height from the top of its tallest ascender to the bottom of its lowest descender. It indicates how large or small the text will appear and is crucial for ensuring readability.Not to be confused with Type Size.
Rag
Rag refers to the uneven, irregular edge of text in a paragraph that doesn’t align on the right or left side. A well-controlled rag ensures readability and aesthetic appeal by avoiding distracting or overly jagged edges in the body of text.
Sans Serif
Sans (meaning without) serif fonts are typefaces that do not have the small decorative strokes, or serifs, at the end of their letterforms. These fonts are often seen as modern, clean, and minimalistic, frequently used in digital design for their simplicity and clarity.
Script Font
Script fonts mimic the fluid strokes of handwriting, featuring connected letters with a more personal, elegant feel. These fonts are often used for formal occasions like invitations or logos, but they can be harder to read in large blocks of text.
Serif
A serif is the small decorative stroke or line added to the end of a letter’s main strokes in certain fonts. Serif fonts are often considered more traditional and are commonly used in printed materials like books and newspapers for enhanced readability.
Slab Serif
Slab serif fonts are defined by their thick, block-like serifs, offering a bold and modern aesthetic. Unlike traditional serifs, they maintain minimal contrast in stroke thickness, making them ideal for impactful headlines and logos.
Small Caps
Small caps are uppercase letters that are scaled down to the height of lowercase characters. They are often used for acronyms, headings, or subheadings to create a cleaner, more refined look without the dominance of full-size capital letters.
Spine
The spine is the principal curved stroke found in the letters "S" and "s." This defining feature not only shapes the character but also enhances its overall legibility and aesthetic appeal. Recognising the spine's role helps typographers and designers create more cohesive and visually appealing text compositions.
Typeface
A typeface is the overall design of characters, including letters, numbers, and symbols. It refers to the broader design family, such as Arial or Times New Roman, which may include various fonts with different weights, styles, and sizes.
Tracking
Tracking, also known as letter-spacing, refers to the overall adjustment of space between characters across an entire block of text. Unlike kerning, which adjusts space between individual characters, tracking affects the spacing of all letters equally.
Tittle
The tittle is the dot above lowercase "i" and "j" in typography. While small, it’s a critical part of legibility and is often designed to match the overall style of the typeface, sometimes even becoming a decorative element.
Type Size
Type size can be misleading, whilst it refers to the perceived visual size of a font, it can vary even when set at the same size. This difference is due to design factors like x-height and stroke weight, affecting readability and overall aesthetic.
Typography
Typography is all around us, from the books we read to street signs and product packaging. It not only defines the style and appearance of text but also encompasses the art of arranging typefaces. Whether you're crafting documents for work, school, or personal projects, typography plays a crucial role in how written language is communicated and perceived.
Weight
Weight refers to the thickness of characters in a typeface. Common weights include light, regular, bold, and extra bold. The weight of a font can influence readability and the overall tone, with heavier weights conveying emphasis and authority.
Widows
In typography, a widow refers to a single word or a very short line that appears at the end of a paragraph on it's own line, isolated from the rest of the text. This can disrupt the flow of reading and create an unbalanced look on the page.
X-height
X-height refers to the height of lowercase letters in a typeface, specifically the height of the letter "x." It impacts the legibility and overall appearance of a font, influencing how tall or compact the text appears in relation to its capital letters.
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