Typography Definition

The art and technique of arranging and formatting text.

Typography is the art and techniques of type design, modifying type glyphs, and arranging type. Type glyphs (characters) are created and modified using a variety of illustration techniques. The arrangement of type is the selection of typefaces, point size, line length, leading (line spacing) and letter spacing.

Typography is performed by typesetters, compositors, typographers, graphic artists, art directors, and clerical workers. Until the Digital Age, typography was a specialized occupation. Digitization opened up typography to new generations of visual designers and lay users.

Text Typeography

In traditional typography, text is composed to create a readable, coherent, and visually satisfying whole that works invisibly, without the awareness of the reader. Even distribution with a minimum of distractions and anomalies are aimed at producing clarity and transparency.

Choice of font(s) is perhaps the primary aspect of text typography—prose fiction, non-fiction, editorial, educational, religious, scientific, spiritual and commercial writing all have differing characteristics and requirements. For historic material, established text typefaces are frequently chosen according to a scheme of historical genre acquired by a long process of accretion, with considerable overlap between historical periods.

Contemporary books are more likely to be set with state-of-the-art seriffed "text romans" or "book romans" with design values echoing present-day design arts, which are closely based on traditional models such as those of Nicolas Jenson, Francesco Griffo (a punchcutter who created the model for Aldine typefaces), and Claude Garamond. With their more specialized requirements, newspapers and magazines rely on compact, tightly-fitted text romans specially designed for the task, which offer maximum flexibility, readability and efficient use of page space. Sans serif text fonts are often used for introductory paragraphs, incidental text and whole short articles. A current fashion is to pair sans serif type for headings with a high-performance seriffed font of matching style for the text of an article.

The text layout, tone or color of set matter, and the interplay of text with white space of the page and other graphic elements combine to impart a "feel" or "resonance" to the subject matter. With printed media typographers are also concerned with binding margins, paper selection and printing methods.

Typography is modulated by Orthography and linguistics, word structures, word frequencies, morphology, phonetic constructs and linguistic syntax. Typography also is subject to specific cultural conventions. For example, in French it is customary to insert a non-breaking space before a colon (:) or semicolon (;) in a sentence, while in English it is not.

Readability and legibility

Readability and legibility are often confused. Readability is most often and more properly used to describe the ease with which written language is read and understood – it concerns the difficulty of the language itself, not its appearance. Factors that affect readability include sentence and word length, and the frequency of uncommon words.

In contrast, legibility describes how easily or comfortably a typeset text can be read. It is not connected with content or language, but rather with the size and appearance of the printed or displayed text.

Studies of legibility have examined a wide range of factors including type size, type design (for example, comparing serif vs sans serif type, italic type vs roman type), line length, line spacing, colour contrast, the design of right-hand edge (for example, justification (straight right hand edge) vs ranged left, and whether hyphenated). Legibility research was published from the late nineteenth century on, but the overall finding has been that the reading process is remarkably robust, and that significant differences are hard to find. So comparative studies of seriffed vs sans serif type, or justified vs unjustified type, have failed to settle the argument over which is best. (Serifs are the small cross-strokes at the end of letters in fonts such as Times; sans serif fonts, such as Arial, lack these cross strokes). Unfortunately, the fashion for legibility research was over by the time that revolutionary changes in printing and display technology (ie, laser printing and PC display screens) made it actually of potential interest.

Legibility is usually measured through speed of reading, with comprehension scores used to check for effectiveness (ie, not a rushed or careless read). For example, Miles Tinker, who published numerous studies from the 1930s to the 1960s, used a speed of reading test that required participants to spot incongruous words as an effectiveness filter.

These days, legibility research tends to be limited to critical issues, or the testing of specific design solutions (for example, when new typefaces are developed). Examples of critical issues include typefaces (also called fonts) for people with visual impairment, and typefaces for highway signs, or for other conditions where legibility may make a key difference.

Much of the legibility research literature is somewhat atheoretical - various factors were tested individually or in combination (inevitably so, as the different factors are interdependent), but many tests were carried out in the absence of a model of reading or visual perception. Some typographers believe that the overall word shape is very important in readability, and that letter by letter recognition (sometimes known as parallel letterwise recognition) is either wrong, less important, or not the entire picture. Studies that distinguish between the two models have favored parallel letterwise recognition, and the latter is widely accepted by cognitive psychologists (citation?).

Some commonly agreed findings of legibility research include: text set in lower case is more legible than text set all in upper case (capitals), presumably because lower case letter structures and word shapes are more distinctive, having greater saliency with the presence of extenders (ascenders, descenders and other projecting parts); regular upright type (roman) is found to be more legible that italics, contrast, without dazzling brightness, has also been found to be important, with black on yellow/cream being most effective; positive images (eg, black on white) are easier to read than negative or reversed (eg, white on black); the upper portions of letters play a stonger part than the lower portions in the recognition process; legibility is compromised by letterspacing, word spacing and leading that are too tight or too loose. Generous vertical space separates lines of text, making it easier for the eye to distinguish one line from the next, or previous line. Poorly designed fonts and those that are too tightly or loosely fitted can also result in poor legibility.