Typography Terminology

As I mentioned in my previous post “Get the typography right and you are halfway there”

When I started to learn about typography I looked up some of the typographic terminology, and made myself a small glossary of what I felt were the most important to understand.

Body of type:

Baseline: the baseline is the invisible line that all the letters sit upon.

X-height: this is a really simple one to remember because it literally means the height of the lowercase x and the lower case letters

Ascender: is the part of the letter that ascends (goes upward) beyond the x-height

Descender: is the part of the letter that descends (goes down) below the baseline

Serifs: are the extra strokes at the end of the character. Fonts without serifs are called San-serifs; easy way to remember this is “sans” in French means without.

Leading: the space between lines of text. In historical typography printing workshops strips of lead would have been placed between each row of text.  In HTML/CSS this is replaced by line-height

Kerning: the amount of space between one letter to its neighboring letter

Tracking: the amount of space between each letter

Kerning and Tracking can be used to for a better fit for the design, and also can be used to get rid of Rivers: rivers are the larger white spaces running down a block of justified aligned text. 

After being lucky enough to work in a typography printing workshop using movable type for letterpress printing. I quickly discovered that each typeface in each type size has two drawers the upper draw holding all the uppercase letters and that left the lower draw with all the lowercase letters. Which is pretty straight forward and simple.