Most people think typography is about making text easy to read. But that’s like saying a car is for getting you from one place to another, or food is just about putting nutrients into your body. Sure, that’s all true, but misses something incredibly important: how you do it changes how you feel about it.
The style of the car matters in your experience driving. The quality, style, and even layout of the food on your plate matters in your experience of eating. And the typography — how the text appears on a page or screen — matters to the reader. Because text is not just about conveying information, it’s about communicating a rich broth of feelings.
So it’s really worth learning more about how to use type — style it, format it, carefully flow it — so that you can ensure your audience gets the right feeling at the right time. Sadly, too many designers (and let’s face it, we’re all designers these days!) ignore some fundamental rules of text and type. The result is like cooking with too much salt, or driving a car with no rearview mirror — it creates an uncomfortable and even confusing experience for the reader.
Let’s take a look at six typography mistakes you can learn to avoid:
Get Your Spacing Right
Pro designers know that the spaces between and around the text are as important as the type itself. And space around text is like air: if you offer too little, the reader feels suffocated; if you offer too much, the reader can become disoriented. Spacing comes in a number of different forms:
- Some people are still typing two spaces after punctuation. (Yes, I’m looking at you.) You really, really need to stop this immediately. (Exception: monospaced fonts, such as Courier, still need double-spaces. But that’s the only exception!)
- Leading (line spacing) and kerning (letter spacing) are critical. You should rarely depend on the default values you get in an application. Instead, you often need to make changes based on the width of the text column, the size of the text, and the font you’re using. Whatever you choose, make sure your spacing is as consistent as possible! (Classic newbie error: having one line in the middle or end of a paragraph have different leading than the others.)
- When you think your document is nearly finished, take some time to look for rivers: white space in the middle of paragraphs that extends over two or more lines. Whitespace rivers can subtly draw the eye off course.
Note the whitespace rivers and inconsistent leading, indicated in red. You may not always be able to avoid rivers, but you can always fix bad line spacing!
Use the Correct Character
You’ve heard the old saying: words mean things. But symbols (or glyphs or characters, or whatever you want to call them) also mean things, and using the correct symbol is really important in typography. After all, you wouldn’t use an “A” when you mean to use a “B” right? They’re different letters!
Similarly, an “x” is a different symbol than × (the multiplication sign), so don’t type 3×3 if you mean 3 × 3.
Here’s another one that separates the novice from the maven: dashes. Stop typing a dash (or hyphen) for a range of numbers or dates, such as 3–8 or January–March. Instead, hold down the Option/Alt when you press the hyphen character to get an en dash. That’s the correct symbol for ranges. If you’re tempted to type two dashes in a row – – like this – – then stop yourself and type Shift-Option/Alt-hyphen. That creates a real em dash — like this one.
Know your symbols, and use the right one at the right time.
Avoid Stretching Type
You may be surprised to learn that font designers can spend hundreds of hours to get a font to look right. So imagine the look on that designer’s face when you say, “oh, I’ll just squeeze the word to make it fit” or “well, I don’t have a real italic, so I’ll just skew this to make it look kinda’ right.”
Don’t. Just… don’t.
That said, scaling text horizontally by one or two percent is fine; it’s unlikely anyone will notice. (And you’d be surprised at how helpful this small amount can be when setting justified text.)
Avoid Over-Styling
I once consulted with a designer who used over 15 different forms of styling, often in the same paragraph! Italic, bold, bold-italic, various colors, fonts, and more. It all seemed to make sense in her mind, but was complete style overload for everyone else. In typography, less is usually more: if possible, try to stick with just one form of emphasis (like italic).
I’ve really seen files like this… If I didn’t laugh, I’d cry.
Avoid Widows, Orphans, and Runts
A typographic widow is the last line of a paragraph that gets pushed, by itself, to the top of a new page or column. An orphan is the first line of a paragraph that is stranded by itself at the bottom of a column. A runt is a too-short last line of a paragraph. (What constitutes “too short” is up to the designer, though the second half of a hyphenated word sitting on its own is definitely too short.)
Paying attention to little details like these is one of the hallmarks of professional typography. It’s worth taking some time to learn how to avoid these unpleasantries.
Be Consistent
Good typography relies on consistency. (I’m not saying that you can’t have fun and go nuts with some of your type; but it’ll only work if you have a consistent foundation to bounce off from.)
The best way to ensure consistency is to use styles, which means you have to develop almost an obsession with paragraph styles and character styles. (Important: You should almost never apply a character style to an entire paragraph. That’s what paragraph styles are for.)
There are other rules of consistency, too. For example, as I mentioned above, you should be sure the leading is consistent throughout your paragraphs, and from paragraph to paragraph… try to be consistent with spacing between paragraphs, and so on. When you’re inconsistent, it tells your reader that you (and by extension, the text you’re setting) is sloppy. If you don’t care enough to set the text well, then why should they care enough to read it?
Finally, Always Be Learning
Typography is a wonderfully rich and deep subject. If you like the lessons here, I’d like to suggest several other ways you can learn more:
Check out some of the live and online events we produce, such as The InDesign + Type Summit, which is a great chance to take your typography skills from OK to OMG.
Also, here are some articles:
- 5 Common Copy Errors (and How to Avoid Them)
- TypeTalk: How Good Typography Can Help Your Job Search
- The Definitive Guide to Quotes, Apostrophes, and Primes
This article was last modified on July 12, 2021
This article was first published on July 12, 2021
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