A Designer’s Notes — Week 2

Published in

Design Year

3 min readJan 19, 2017

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The Big Ideas

By understanding the underlying message that your choice of text contains, you will become more effective as you design and layout projects containing words and phrases. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but you have to know a thousand words to replace it.

The Type Size, also called the Cap Height, is the overall height of capital letters in the formation of words.
The Ascender is the upward tail on letters like h, l, t, b, d, and k.
The Descender is the downward tail for letters like g, q, and y.
The Counter is the white space located inside letters like o and p.
The X Height is the height of the letter, and does not include ascenders or descenders.
Baselines are the boundary that the lowest part of the letter rests on. Take a look at the y, p, g, p and y letters in the illustration above. The solid line they are resting on is the baseline.
Kerning is the space located between individual letters of a word.
Leading is the space between the lines of text.
Left alignment is default for reading. Center alignment is used for headlines and titles. Right alignment is used for a more professional look (i.e. Business Cards). Justified alignment is reserved for newpaper print and body text for textbooks, and is more difficult to work with.
Serif type has extensions or strokes on the end of the letters and is easy to read. San-Serif does not have extensions or strokes o the end of the letters and are hevily used for labelling, headlines, and titles.