The rules and how to break them
Choosing fonts and using them properly requires subjective, not objective decisions. Still, there are some very loose guidelines for font usage you might wish to consider. You can also feel free to break them if the right opportunity presents itself.
- Always focus on the audience. That really cool typeface you saw on the snowboard ad won't work for your grandparents.
- You can't be taught how to use type. You can only learn how to use it. Prowl the newspapers, magazines, TV, the internet, books, posters, movie titling sequences and any other source of inspiration. Don't be afraid to look at what you determine to be "crappy" type . By looking at it, critically, you learn what not to do.
- If you have lots of text on the page, choose a plain serif font for the body text. Don't be chauvinistic and discount the use of Times, Times New Roman or Century just because "everybody is using them". Use the various fonts in the family together and your work will result in a surprising unity of design.
- The "serif" vs "sans serif" debate is right up there with the Macintosh vs. Windows wars on the net. If it works. It works. When in doubt, set the heads in sans serif and the body text in serif.
- If you must reverse type- white type on a black or colored background- do it sparingly. Even then, think twice about reversing a serif font. The fine details of these fonts tend to fill in. Go crazy with the sans serif faces instead and, if you do reverse a sans, space it out a bit to increase readability.
- Running a line of text from one edge of the browser window to the other is not a great idea. The text becomes " that grey stuff around the pictures" not information. Anywhere between 36 and 70 characters per line is a good length.
- If you don't know what you are doing, don't "play" with the font. If you need to condense it by "squeezing the letters closer to each other", use the condensed version of the font- e.g. Franklin Gothic Condensed. The same goes for scaling. All you are doing is reducing legibility.
- Always use curly quotes and apostrophes.
- Always add one space after the period. Two spaces is a throwback to the typewriter.
- Use En dashes or Em dashes, not hyphens. Leave the use of the hyphen to the amateurs. The use of the dash depends on where you live. En dashes are used in countries such as Canada where the British tradition is prevalent. Some designers get really picky and will minus kern these spaces to suit the particular setting, especially in display type used for headlines and so on. The en dash is so named because it is roughly the same width as the cap N. Em dashes (option/shift/hyphen) are used in the U.S. instead of the "En" dash". It is named "em" because it is approximately the width of the capital letter M.
The origin of serifs and other useless information
Nobody can say with any accuracy how serifs suddenly arrived on the scene. The most plausible explanation has to do with the lettering in Rome.
At the time, letters were carved into stone columns and so on. These letters were carved after a scribe, using a brush, "painted" the letters onto the stone. The serif appeared when the scribe stopped the brush and lifted it, leaving a bit of a brush edge on the letter. The carver, not seeing the error, simply chiseled that edge out of the stone as well. Thus the serif.
Another explanation is the serif was developed by scribes adding a stroke when the hand drawn letter was finished.
Another of our other favorites is the origin of the "gibberish" or "Greek" that is used for text placement- Lorem Ipsum. The origin of "Lorem Ipsum" actually goes back to the early 1500's when typographers would create specimen books of their fonts. Where did they get it? Before and After Magazine,, Volume 4, Number 2 offered a rather interesting explanation.
According to the article, the phrase is Latin and is taken from Cicero's "de Finibis Bonorum et Malorum" which was written in 45 BC. The actual phrase is: "Neque porro quisquam est qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit ..." The early typographers simply scrambled it up.
Each of the letterforms in a font is there for a specific reason. Never forget, for an instant, that the use of certain "marks" can actually destroy the understanding of a word or even change its meaning to something completely opposite to the original intent.
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