Knowledge of typography is relevant not only for narrow specialists. It will be useful for marketers, entrepreneurs and managers: if you type texts yourself or find it difficult to evaluate the finished design. I will consider methods of designing inscriptions, types of fonts, rules for their combination and trends in branding.
What types of fonts are there
Usually, text design begins with the selection of fonts. They can all be divided into five groups:And these are the criteria for their differences: Antiqua has significantly different stroke thicknesses and the presence of serifs. Grotesques have a uniform thickness and no serifs. Slab serifs are the guys with simple wide serifs and barely noticeable difference in stroke thickness. An intermediate option between antique and grotesque. Handwritten letters (also called pseudo-handwritten, calligraphic or script letters) have smoothed corners and the presence of connecting strokes. Decorative ones are the fruit of the sick or healthy imagination of artists. They do not obey any rules. Now let’s go through them all and look at some examples.
A phone number library is typically a collection phone number library or database that stores a set of phone numbers, organized for various purposes such as customer service, marketing, outreach, or business tasks. Companies can utilize these libraries to manage contacts, automate messages, or conduct market research.
Antiquas
This is the first typographic achievement of mankind. Antiqua was developed for the Latin alphabet in the 15th century. Handwriting preceded the font: therefore, all letters have serifs, and the styles are based on the ductal principle – there are thin and thick lines, as from the movement of a pen. In the 17th century, during the Baroque era, the antique type was transformed – the contrast of thicknesses increased, the lines became more rigid and mechanical, and the letters became more and more distant from handwritten ones in appearance.
Grotesques
They have been with us for a relatively short time. In the 19th century, they began to be actively used for newspaper headlines, posters and billboards – such letters were clearly distinguishable from afar. By the beginning of the 20th century, they began to be used for typesetting large texts: the form of writing here is simpler than in the antique, and printing was cheaper. Nowadays, grotesques surround us everywhere and do not cause any surprise.
Other fonts
Have been developing since the 19th century. For grotesque, they have too obvious a difference in thickness and powerful serifs. For antique, the hubspot sales. the hub to manage sales easily difference in thickness is too small and the serifs are too rough. The result is a hybrid – strange, but nice. There are also handwritten fonts (scripts), they cannot be confused with anything. Before the invention of the keyboard, the speed of writing was important to humans, so the letters have a simplified form and connections with each other – all this is characteristic of fonts inspired by handwriting.
Features of the Cyrillic alphabet
I deliberately considered the types of fonts in Latin, because with the Russian language things are more complicated. With the light hand of Peter I, Cyrillic took the Western European form of graphemes as a basis, and our letters since then do not look very harmonious. Many characters almost completely correspond to the Latin alphabet, but along with alb directory them there are “yu”, “zh” and “shch”, which are much wider than other letters. Therefore, composing Russian-language phrases in columns, for example, is quite difficult. And in general, the variations between letters are more obvious – they complicate any font composition. This is one of the reasons why many domestic brands prefer to be named in Latin. Cyrillic versions of foreign logos by Ilya Kalimulin are circulating on the Internet. They are well made and clearly illustrate my words.
Font Pair Combinations
Sometimes a single font is used on a specific banner or web page, but more often there are several. The best option is a pair in which one of the fonts acts as a display font (attracts attention), and the other is simpler and more basic, to convey detailed information. The degree of openness of the characters (aperture) is also important. It can be easily assessed by the letter “c”. It is good when the fonts are similar in some of these points. But there should be a visible difference. Therefore, it is absolutely necessary to avoid combining fonts that belong to the same group. Do not take two old style antiquas or two neo-grotesques – they will look dirty together.
Longreads and Service Text
We’ve covered the types of fonts, their combinations, and the options you can change in graphic editors to transform the appearance of text. Let’s see how this works on live brands.
Good typography is invisible. This idea is relevant if we want to quickly convey a lot of important information to a person. Decorative elements here will only distract the reader. On websites, we often come across long descriptions of goods, services or terms of cooperation, we see tips and windows with additional information. All this text should be designed concisely.