All right.
The next topic I want to talk about is typography.
Now, I know a lot of students always say to me
"But why do I need to learn about typography?
I just open up Word, click the dropdown,
find Times New Roman,
my favorite font.
And then just put that on everything. It's done right?"
Well let's think about this.
Well let's say it's Valentine's Day and you decide that you want to write a letter to your beloved Valentine
and you change the font to something cursive like this.
"You'll always be mine."
I don't know if she or he will be
but you have a good chance.
Now let's say that you chose the wrong font.
That's a bit of a problem.
Not only do I not think your Valentine is going to take very kindly to this,
you might also have the police on your back which is a bit of a problem.
So fonts really do matter and it's important to consider not only their mood but also how to combine
different fonts.
And it's a really really easy way to make your designs look very professional and really slick. Out of
all of the fonts in the world
there's pretty much two large families that you should really know about.
One is the Serif family where they have these little feet at the end of their central beams.
And the reason why they have these old feet is because the Serif typeface were inspired by the marble
carvings of days of yore.
So if you next go out and you take a look at the buildings around you especially if you're in a historical
area, take a look at places where they've carved into stone or marble and you'll notice that they also
have these little feet at the end of the central beams.
So why is that?
I don't know how many of you carved marble in your spare time but if you did you would know that once
you chisel has gone into the Rock and you need to exit your engraving it's actually not possible to
create 90 degree angles when you're carving into rock.
So this is where the Serif typeface gets their inspiration from.
And this is also the reason why when you're choosing a Serif typeface you're making your design look
more serious, more authoritative and also a little bit older as well.
So it's really good if you're designing something like a letterhead for a legal company or a magazine
for architectural design.
But when we take a look at the big family of Serif typefaces
they're actually further subdivided into smaller sub families like Old style, Transitional, Modern and
Slab-Serif.
Now the really interesting thing is you can actually tell how old a typeface would look by looking at
the difference between the thickest and the thinnest parts of each letter.
So compare the Old Style 'o' versus the Transitional
'o' versus the modern
'o'. And look at how that difference between the thickest part of the letter and the thinnest part gets
more and more exaggerated as you get towards a more modern font.
So if you want something that looks authoritative but modern then maybe you want to go for a modern
Serif typeface like Didot. But if you want it to come across as a little bit older, a little bit more aged
maybe you have a winery, maybe you want to go for an Old Style Serif instead.
Now just as different colors have different moods and emotions, different fonts also have different moods
and they also convey a different message to a user depending on which one you choose.
So the Serif family generally come across as traditional, stable, respectable, authoritative.
These are the words that get thrown around by designers when they're thinking about the Serif typeface.
So for example, the next time you go to a magazine rack pick up the Vogue magazine.
Take a look at their title and see how it's a modern Serif typeface.
It's got hugely exaggerated difference between the thick and thin parts of the lettering and it looks
authoritative and it knows what it is talking about.
Now on the other hand, if we think about the San-Serifs, they're kind of a different family because instead
of having the Serifs or the little feet at the end the central beams, they have perfect right angles.
And it's this right angle that makes the San-Serif family look so much more friendly, more approachable,
more novel and more contemporary.
So for example, you will tend to get words like sensible, simple, straightforward. And this is why a lot
of startups love using the San-Serif typeface in their websites.
For example, a Humanist typeface which is a subfamily of the San-Serifs. It's something that is known
as a highly readable typeface. And in fact, even within the Serifs and the San-Serifs, you will tend to
see designers going for the San-Serifs if they want to write body text which needs to be more legible
and more readable.
Now within this sub family, there's even differences in terms of legibility and readability.
So how easy are the words to read and how pleasant is it to read the letters.
There was a really interesting study done by MIT a few years back where they took two groups of users,
one they put them into a car which had a dashboard made of a Humanist typeface and the other car had
a dashboard which had a Grotesque San-Serif typeface. And what they did is they tracked the pupils of
the people who were driving the cars and they tested how long each driver needed to look down at the
dashboard before they got enough information from the speedometer or the odometer and before they could
come back and look at the road again. And really surprisingly they found that just by changing the font
from a Grotesque San-Serif to a Humanist San-Serif, they could save the drivers somewhere around
30 to 40 percent of the time that's required to understand the information.
So imagine that car is on a freeway that's driving at 60 miles, 100 miles an hour.
That difference in the amount of time the user needs to look down at the dashboard could be the difference
between life and death.
And as designers, we rarely get to make that kind of difference in the world right?
So knowing that the Humanist typeface, all of the fonts that belong in that category like Gill Sans,
Tahoma, Verdana, these are highly readable and highly legible fonts which you can use in the body types
for example of your sales pitch.
Now, even though we're not saving lives with our sales pitches,
if you manage to get the user to read through more of your sales copy then they're probably going to
be more convinced and more likely to buy your product
right?
So readability and legibility when you're choosing fonts is incredibly important. And the things that
you're looking for in the letters when you're looking for legibility are open shapes and a lot of space
between each of the letters and also the forms look unambiguous so they look different
for example here the 'g' and the 9 actually look different on the second line. And finally, varying proportions.
So having an 'O' that's very wide and a '0' that's a bit more narrow so you can actually tell the difference
between the two.
Now while we've talked about using fonts it's often that you see people go a bit overboard where they
choose 10 fonts in the same design. And that makes your design look very cluttered and very unprofessional.
I recommend actually sticking to just two fonts in one design.
So if you're making a poster keeping that to two fonts. If you're making a section of your website keeping
then again to two fonts. It just looks a lot cleaner and a lot tighter.
And when you're combining these two different fonts you want to try to go for similar moods. So find
fonts that have a similar mood to each other and also a similar time era.
You don't want something that looks ultramodern with something that looks like it's from the days of
yore combined together. It looks a little bit weird.
Now the things you want to contrast are the serifness.
So for example you on the heading to be a Serif and the body to be a San-Serif or the opposite way
round. It just creates more interest in your design.
And similarly, you can also create interest by just changing up the weights between the heading and the
body. So making the heading really really bold or even using a black typeface and making the body text
using something like thin or regular or light. These different weights can create contrast in your design.
Now if you don't remember anything from this talk on typefaces, I just want you to look at these six
fonts and try to wipe them from your memory because it is very very difficult to make these designs
look good unless I guess if you're running a lemonade stand.
But if you want to look professional, if you want to look designs, try to use one of the other fonts that
we've talked about and try to ignore these ones which are difficult to read and have moods that are
difficult to fit in in a professional setting.
The next time you're designing a website think about what typefaces you're going to choose.
Think about what you're trying to convey with those typefaces and then pick a font from the San-Serif
or the Serif family and maybe try to combine them
so you have a heading that's a San-Serif and a body that's a Serif and try to create contrast in your
designs.
So keep this in mind and hopefully they'll make your designs a lot more interesting and a lot more professional.