Adobe Type Primer Questions:

1.       How can you tell the difference between a serif and a sans serif typeface?
A serif typeface is a typeface that has a serifs or a cross-line at the end of a stroke. They are like a small decorative stroke at the end of a letter’s main strokes. Typefaces without serifs are known as a sans serif typeface. To tell the difference between the two, the typeface with decorative strokes at the end of a main stroke is a serif and the typeface without those strokes is a sans serif typeface.

2.       What does the term ‘x-height’ refer to, and how does it affect readability of text?
The x-height refers to the height of the lowercase letter x. It is also the height of the body of lowercase letters in a font. This is excluding the ascenders and descenders. The lowercase letters that do not have ascenders or descenders still extend a little bit above or below the x-height as a part of their design. The x-height varies greatly from typeface to typeface. Typefaces with larger x-heights would be easier to read as opposed to typefaces with smaller x-heights.

3.       What are the ways you can measure type and what were the origins behind these?
Type is measured in two ways. These are the height and the width. In the earlier times, type was cast in metal and the sizes were measured in points. The term point size originally referred to the height of the metal body that held the characters. This was slightly larger than the distance from the highest to the lowest feature in the design. A traditional point is approximately 1/72 of an inch. Today’s digital fonts can be enlarged or reduced by selecting or specifying a point size. Picas are another unit that you can measure font by, one pica is equal to 12 points, and six picas are equal to an inch. This method is still used for digital type. Typefaces with long ascenders or descenders look smaller than other typefaces when both fonts are printed at the same point size. Height is not the only thing that typefaces are commonly identified with; width is also taken into consideration. The width of a typeface is often expressed in the font’s style name, such as condensed or extended. Other expressions of the width include compressed, expanded or wide.

4.       What is a type family? Give examples of variations that you might find in one.
A type family is a collection of typefaces that were designed and intended to be used together. It generally contains three variations on the regular face such as italic, bold and bold italic. For example, the utopia family consists of roman and italic styles as well as regular, semibold, and bold weights.

5.       What is the difference between monospacing and proportional spacing?
Monospacing was usually found commonly in typewriters. A monospaced type is when each character, whether it is an i or an, takes up the same amount of space. Monospaced digital fonts are fonts such as Courier, they work well when a mechanical typewriter look is desired or in cases where the characters should line up vertically. Most type nowadays however is designed to be proportionally spaced. Proportional spacing is when each letter is give just the amount of space needed to look right and be most legible. When using a proportional font, you can fit much more text on a page as opposed to using a monospaced font while at the same time making the text easier to read.

6.       What does the term ‘leading’ refer to, and what are its origins?
Leading refers to the amount of space added between lines of the text to make the document legible. The term originally referred to the thin lead spacers that printers used to physically increase space between lines of the metal type. Most applications automatically apply standard leading based on the point size of the font. Closer leading fits more text on the page, but decreases the legibility. Looser leading spreads text out to fill a page and makes the document easier to read. Leading can also be negative, in which case, the lines of the text are so close that they overlap or touch.

7.       How do letter- and wordspacing affect type readability?

Letter and wordspacing can be adjusted to improve the legibility. Although typefaces are designed with the correct spacing between characters for general use, special situations can result in the type looking crowded or too loose. An example of this is how UPPERCASE letters can look too tight because the designer assumed that uppercase and lowercase letters would be mixed. Some letter combinations result in awkward spacing unless they are kerned. Kerning is the adjustment of space between pairs of letters. Kerning is especially important at large point sizes. As the characters are enlarged, so is the space between them. Wordspacing, the spaces between words, should be constant. To aid readability, it is important to keep work spacing as consistent as possible. Tight work spacing lets you place more text on the page, but it can make it difficult to distinguish words from each other and loose wordspacing fills up the page with a small amount of text, but the text becomes harder to read as the words begin to look disconnected.