Questions from the Reading: Handout & Letter Fountain

What are some ways to indicate a new paragraph.

You can indicate a new paragraph by indentions, size, typeface, color, symbols, and more.

What are some things to look out for when hyphenating text.

Some things to look out for when hyphenating text are awkward breaks and hyphenating proper nouns. You want to have at least two letters in your hyphenation and sometimes three.

Define font hinting. Why is necessary?

Font hinting is the use of instructions to adjust the display of an outline font so that it lines up with a rasterized grid. At small screen sizes, hinting is critical for producing clear, legible text for human readers.

What is letterspacing/tracking? How do you track in Illustrator or InDesign.

Tracking is the adjustment of space for groups of letters and entire blocks of text. It changes the overall appearance and readability of the text, making it more open and airy or more dense. You can track in Illustrator by selecting the range of characters or the type object that you want to adjust and setting the tracking option in the character panel. In InDesign, you can also change the track by selecting the range of characters and in the character panel or control panel, type or select a numeric value for tracking.

Define Kerning? Name 8 kerning pairs. How do you kern in InDesign or Illustrator?

Kerning is the process of adding or subtracting space between specific pairs of characters. Metrics kerning uses kern pairs, which are included with most fonts. Kern pairs contain information about the spacing of specific pairs of letters, which include: LA, To, Ta, Tu, Te, Ty, Wa, WA, and more. In both Illustrator and InDesign, kerning can be adjusted by changing the number in the character panel with the kerning option that looks like A\V.

Try the kerning game. how did you do?

I tried it a while ago and did pretty well, however there were some tricky ones.

What is wordspacing?
Wordspacing is the size of the space between words.

Explain DIN.

DIN stands for Deutsche Industrienorm, German Industrial Standard. In 1936 the German Standard Committee settled upon DIN 1451 as the standard font for the areas of technology, traffic, administration and business. The Committee chose a sans serif font because of its legibility and because its forms are also easy to write. This font was not foreseen for advertisements and other 'artistically oriented uses' and there were disagreements about its aesthetic qualities. The DIN font was seen everywhere in Germany, on signs for towns and traffic, and hence made its way into advertisements because of its ease of recognition.

What is a baseline grid?

A baseline grid is an imaginary grid upon which type sits. The baseline of a piece of type can be forced to 'snap' to this grid to maintain continuity across the pages of a design.

How many characters per line is optimal? Is there a range?

The optimal line length for your body text is considered to be 50-60 characters per line, including spaces. Some suggest up to 75 characters. In order to avoid the drawbacks, you should stay in between 45-75 characters per line.

Define aesthetic text alignment (optically hanging punctuation).

Hanging punctuation and optical alignment makes text edges look more orderly and balanced. The Misalignment is especially noticeable when the text is larger so designers often push it outside of the textbox to avoid the awkward space.

What is a typographic river?

A river typically occurs in justified text block when the separation of the words leaves gaps of white space in several lines.

What is a widow?

A widow is a lone word at the end of a paragraph.

What is an orphan?

An orphan is the final one or two lines of a paragraph separated from the main paragraph to form a new column, and should be avoided at all costs.