Choosing & Using Type
By Daniel Will-Harris
Type. In your lifetime you've seen billions of letters and millions of words, yet you might never have consciously noticed the typefaces you read.
Type is important because it's an unconscious persuader. It attracts attention, sets the style and tone of a document, colors how readers interpret the words, and defines the feeling of the page--usually without the reader recognizing a particular typeface.
TYPE IS YOUR PERSONALITY ON PAPER. Change your typeface and you go from casual to formal, silly to serious, staid to stylish, old fashioned to modern.
TYPE IS IMAGE. You'd dress your best if you were going to an important meeting, and your documents need to be well-dressed, too. Type can reinforce your image as a company or an individual. If you use it consistently enough, people will start to associate you with certain typefaces. They might find themselves thinking of you when they see that typeface, without knowing why.
TYPE IS POWER. Type has an effect on you even if you don't consciously notice it. You can use this power to your advantage to attract attention, strengthen your message, and improve your image, or you can overlook it and work against yourself saying one message with your text while conveying another with your font.
TYPE IS COMMUNICATION. Communication means relaying information about our logic and emotions to others. The better you learn to communicate, the better others will know you, and the better you'll know yourself because logic, emotion, and about 98-percent water are what you're made of.
TYPE IS IMPORTANT. The right typeface can encourage people to read your message. The wrong typeface or bad typography can make your message go unread.
The two most important things to remember...
There are entire books about using type (I've written several). People spend their whole lives studying the practice. But here's what it's all about:
One:Type is on the page to serve the text. It should make the words easy to read and provide a suitable background. Type should not overpower the text.
Type can be beautiful and decorative--but if type calls undueattention to itself or makes it more difficult to read the text--then it becomes self-conscious and distracting--like bad movie direction. Of course, some people will love this and tell you how brilliant you are--but they won't read the text. So what's the point?
Two:There are no good and bad typefaces, there areappropriate and inappropriate typefaces. Think about your reader and the feeling you want to convey, then choose a typeface that fits.
Simplistic? Maybe so. But if everyone followed these two rules, you would have read more things in your life, and understood better what you did read.
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