When you work with your web designer or graphic designer do you often get confused with the terms they use? We totally understand. Typography is full of technical terms which can make the average business owner feel a bit out of their depth. Essentially though, when you cut through the technicalities it’s all about improving the appearance and readability of your website, marketing material and branding collateral such as your logo.
Here’s 50 typography terms (you can find Part 1 – A to C here) that you might come across in designing your brand and/or website and what these terms actually mean. We even put them in alphabetical order in case there was something specific that was confusing you – you can quickly and easily find it.
Descender – this is any stroke which goes below the baseline – g, j, p, q, y as examples.
Diacritic – this is a mark added to a letter in order to specify a specific accent or pronunciation. While most fonts do include glyphs with diacritics it is worth checking on it if you want them to display correctly on your website. An example of a diacritic is café.
Display Font – this refers to a type of font designed to be read at large sizes and are often very well suited to subheading and heading.
Em-dash – this is a horizontal line which is about the same width as an M and is used to separate a unique and yet related idea from the rest of the sentence, and separates an inserted thought from the rest of a sentence.
En-dash – this is a horizontal line which is about the same width as an N and is used to connect numbers that refer to a range of time (1995-1999), and connect words that refer to a range of time (January-March).
Font – this is a broad term (also known as typeface) that refers to the size, weight and style of text. The font you choose will influence how readers perceive your copy, your message and your website as a whole. Fonts also have different personalities and can have an effect on how your message is experienced.
Font Family – refers to a group of fonts that have glyphs with similar features. It could be something broad such as serif or sans-serif or old style versus modern fonts. Utilising different font families can add contrast between body copy and headings or even sub headings.
Glyph – includes letters, numerals, punctuation and other characters. This is a particular consideration if your website will display text in languages other than English or your business name or tagline/slogan includes any special characters.
Heading – this refers to the text that divides up different sections of a web page. Typically a different size and font from the body copy.
Hyphen – this is a small, narrow and horizontal line that creates compound words, groups numbers (such as a phone number 555-555) and connects two parts of a word that go over two lines.
For more help with typography and your website, just contact the team at Website Design Centre.
