Typographic Terminology Poster Page 3

Kerning: Kerning is basically the adjusment of space between pairs of letters (characters) to make them more visually appealing and readable (legible). Its usually applied to individual letter pairs in headlines (titles) and other large text (type).

Tracking: Tracking is basically letter spacing. Tracking adjusts the space between all selected letters. Tracking is usually used to space equally between all the letters. Tracking can be adjusted to creat visual effects and interest with a word or group of words as a headline or title. Tracking tends to work better with uppercase letters, because the lettershapes are easier to read, they are bolder and more uniform. When it comes to lowercase letters however, tracking can make the words difficult to read and sometimes even illegible. Tracking is often used to create white space in a design or the alignment of text (blank space). When people use loose tracking it makes bodies of text appear less dense, making it more visually appealing. Wide letterspacing (tracking) in short bodies (amounts) of text such as a headline or a name can seem stylish, aesthetically pleasing and even glamorous or sophisticated.

Type Families: Type families (also called fonts) are described by most dictionaries as a complete set of type suitable for printing text. What this basically means is that type families (or fonts) are basically a set of characters (letters, symbols etc) that are all in the same style. For example, the font Im using at the moment is called Georgia. Georgia is a font that has serifs and is easily readable. Most fonts, such as Georgia, Arial, Times New Roman and Helvetica usually have certain variations within the font such as effects like Italic, Bold, and Bold Italic. Most fonts or type families have these variations. Most of the time you can also change the

to the history of typography, the font Helvetica is one of the most-used and popular fonts in existence.

Size of fonts. According to many sources, especially when it comes