Layout Vocabulary

Ligatures: A single letterform that links to letters and gets rid of any awkward touching. For example, often times the lowercase f and i are joined so that the dot of the i doesn't interfere with the ascender on the f.

Em dash: relative measurement, linked to the size of the type the size of the em equals the size of the points of the font. An em character rarely equals the size of an M however it is used to define paragraphs and indents or spacing.

En dash: the en is equal to one half of the em dash. It is also a relative measurement. used to denote nested clauses but also means 'to' in phrases like 10-12 and 2001-2008.

Hyphen: are in justified text and allow spacing issues to be resolved however it results in many broken words, which to designers is a design don't! The point however at which a word breaks, usually a syllable, can be controlled.

Hyphenation: Look out for too many hyphens in one paragraph. Three or more hyphens in a row is a design don't. Hyphens that create orphans and widows, and hyphens that alter the kerning of typeset paragraphs. Finally those nasty typographic rivers.

Inch/Quote mark: An inch mark " is one that denotes a measurement of something. A quote mark “ ” are those that surround a statement or phrase by are particular person. The inch marks are always straight up and down, while quotation marks are curved.

Foot/Apostrophe mark: An apostrophe is a single closing quotation mark or shows possession. A foot mark denotes the measurement of a foot.

Hanging Punctuation: When punctuation is found at the beginning or end of a line, it hangs out past the rest of the words in the column, so as to not interrupt the word spacing in the line.

CMYK/RGB: cyan, magenta, yellow, black, the four color model of printing and its process. The RGB is an additive color model. Represents red, green, blue light is added together to reproduce a broad array of colors. Purpose is for sensing, representing, and display of color on electronic devices such as televisions and computers and photography.

Paragraph Changes: There are many many ways to indicate paragraph breaks, some include. Text color, size, weight, position, indention, symbols, characters, lines, shapes, spaces, boxes, drop caps and so on. Drop caps are typically only used on the first paragraph and then another form of para break is used thereafter, it would be annoying to have too many drop caps.

Justification/minimum/optimum/maximum: space between the word is adjusted in each line, giving even margins at both left and right. Optimum type size is determined by the nature of the document effected by the need to fit any number of words per page. The minimum number of words before a hyphen and the minimum number of words after a hyphen. Maximum is the maximum number of words before and after hyphenation.

x-height: general font size is judged by how tall the lowercase x is. Some fonts are naturally taller or wider than others. Larger x-height makes the texture darker.

Colour Effects: The idea of heaviness and lightness in text. Can help decide what the reader looks at first.

Type Texture: choice of typeface, type size, leading, word spacing, and line measure affects the texture and color or tonal value of text setting. Changing any of these things alters the tonal value and displays a new characteristic of texture and color to the surface. Color describes tonal density and texture created by type on the page. More specifically describes the degree of variation or contrast in weight between thick and thin strokes.

White Space: Gutters add legibility and function in the design. Weight, size, and alignment also effect the amount of white space in the composition. Division of paragraphs should also be taken into account.

Closeline: A horizontal line that text aligns to that makes text easy to read across the page.

Typographic River: Spaces that are created in the white space of justified text.

Baseline Grid: An grid upon which type sits. Promotes unity in the design.

Optimum Line Length: About 6-8 words per line is ideal. Or 45- 75 characters per line. Average is 60.
There should be fewer characters in magazines and newspapers.

Mult. Column Grid: This grid is all about creating a system for arranging text and images within a certain space. The best grids are flexible to allow for different column widths. The added divisions help to get rid of symmetry within the composition. Flexible in terms of column widths.

Flash

Flash is a program used to create animations and add interactivity to web pages. We as designers use Flash as a way to communicate things via motion and add an extra layer of professionalism to web pages. Consumers will obviously be more attracted to websites that allow them to interact rather than just stare at information and pictures.

Examples:

1. Typorganism.com: This website uses flash as a way to animate buttons so that they move around within a petri dish. This motion helps to communicate the idea of type as an organism. It would not be as effective if the images were static.

2. Rated R: This animation by a young kid shows how easy flash is to learn and operate. He created natural movements and added sound to create an effective message.

3. Type City: This website seems to be the ultimate in interaction. It allows the user to navigate through a landscape to search for information. Flash is also used to animate the loading screen, which is a nice touch while you're waiting for the screen to come up.

Information Design: Jessica Hagy

I really liked the daily notecard diagrams from Jessica Hagy. So many of the designs in "Data Flow" were really complex, but Jessica Hagy gets huge ideas across in the simplest form they could be. I think we can all learn from how much she does with so little.

Final Poster Series

Perpetua (Stolen from Jenny)

2. Perpetua was designed by Eric Gill. He was born February 22, 1882 in Brighton Sussex and passed away on November 17, 1940

3. Eric Gill, the highly skilled English letter-cutter, writer, and sculptor, originally designed this type for Stanley Morison at Monotype in 1925.

4-5. This font fits into the transitional classification because its face retains the qualities of stone-cut lettering, as well as the old style features of a slanted stress and medium contrast between thick and thin letter strokes. The serifs are particularly small, sharply cut, and horizontal. The italic looks more like a sloping roman compared to the usual cursive-style letter form. Perpetua has a small x-height which impairs readability. It also has long ascenders and descenders which need a lot of leading; this limits its use as a mainstream text face. Even so, the roman and italic fonts are widely available in regular and bold weights.

6. Three other fonts from the transitional classification are Baskerville, Caslon, and Bell.

7. In the year of 1925, the world starting to see the makings of World War II. This was the year when Hitler wrote his highly controversial book "Mein Kampf." The Locarno conferences took place to seek to secure European peace by mutual guarantees. John Baird transmitted the first television image in London. Leica marketed Oscar Barnack's 35 mm camera.

8. Eric Gill also designed the typefaces Gill Sans, Joanna, and Aries.

9. Perpetua is a typeface that was designed by British sculptor, typeface designer, stonecutter and printmaker Eric Gill (1882–1940). Gill attended art college in Chichester before studying under Edward Johnston at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London. A devout Christian, Eric Gill converted to Catholicism in 1913. Between 1913 and 1918 Eric Gill produced fourteen reliefs with scenes for the Stations of the Cross for Westminster Cathedral in London. In 1918 Eric Gill co-founded the Guild of St Joseph and St Dominic, a religious community of craftsmen. In 1920 Eric Gill co-founded the Society of Wood Engravers. From 1924 Eric Gill designed book layouts and most of his typeface designs date from around 1930. From 1928 Eric Gill had his own printing press at Speen, Buckinghamshire. He received commissions from bibliophile publishers, including Golden Cockerel Press, Cranach-Presse in Weimar, Leipzig publishers Faber & Faber, J.M. Dent & Sons, and the Limited Editions Club (established in 1929). Eric Gill executed numerous book illustrations, woodcuts, graphics, and watercolors, which are mainly devotional in content.

Though not designed in the historical period of transitional type (the hallmark of transitional type was John Baskerville's type designed in the last half of the 1700s), Perpetua can be classified with transitional typefaces because of characteristics such as high stroke contrast and bracketed serifs. Along with these characteristics, the personality of Perpetua bears the distinctive personality of Eric Gill's letterforms. According to Robert Harling in The Letter Forms and Type Designs of Eric Gill, Gill began work on Perpetua in 1925 at the request of Stanley Morison, typogaphical advisor to Monotype. Morision sought Gill's talent to design a new typeface for the foundry. By 1929, Perpetua Roman was issued as Monotype Series 239. Gill designed two companion faces for Perpetua. The first was a typeface called Felicity. That design was met with mixed reactions. A second italic, called Perpetua Italic, was drawn by Gill and subsequently issued by Monotype along with Perpetua Roman. Telltale distinctions of the unused Felicity (as seen in the illustration in Harling, page 51) include the absence of a serif at the baseline of the lowercase d and a straight tail on the lowercase y. Overall, Felicity is less sloped than Perpetua Italic. Aptly named, Perpetua was set in a limited edition of a new translation by Walter H. Shewring of The Passion of Perpetua and Felicity. The book was printed in 1929. The same type and illustrations (also done by Gill) for that book subsequently appeared in the Fleuron (number 7) which was edited by Stanley Morision and printed in 1930. Also set in Perpetua and published in 1929 was Art Nonsense and Other Essays written and illustrated by Eric Gill. He would receive many important and prestigious commissions, including works for Westminster Cathedral, the League of Nations, the BBC, and the London Transport before his death in 1940. Gill’s articles and ideas are being revived, reprinted and spread by so-called traditional and conservative Catholics. For example, his article “Painting and the Public” was included in the book Distributist Perspectives: Volume 1, Essays on the Economics of Justice and Charity, published by IHS Press in 2004. But what made Eric Gill famous was principally his art. Even though Gill has a highly skilled artist, some controversy with him and his work because some of it became very sexually explicit. Library Journal endorses that “Gill flaunted traditional morality by engaging in countless affairs as well as incestuous relationships with both his sisters and daughters.”

President Barack Obama used Perpetua in his campaign logo.

“The artist is not a different kind of person, but every person is a different kind of artist”

-Eric Gill

Poster Series 2

Poster Series

Cropped Letters

Posters

Akzidenz Grotesk

02) Designed by Gunter Gerhard Lange (1921-2008)

03) Akzidenz Grotesk was released in 1896.

04) It is classified as Grotesque Sans-Serif

05) Sans-serif fonts are fonts without serifs. In print, san-serif fonts are more widely used for headlines instead of body text. This is due to the fact that the lines of the serifs supposedly guide the human eye through large blocks of text more effectively. Sans-serif fonts, however, are very frequently used in the body text of web documents. Computer screens usually cannot reproduce serifs, as the often look distorted.

Sans-serif fonts were originally called "grotesque" because they were said to resemble cave art.

06) Other fonts in this classification include Helvetica, Univers, and Franklin Gothic.

07) Other events of 1896 include the first modern Summer Olympics in Greece, the X-Ray machine was released for the first time, and 27,000 people are killed by an earthquake and Tsunami in Japan.

08) Gunter Gerhard Lange was born in Germany in 1921. He left his hometown of Frankfurt-an-der-Oder to go to school, but he was called to join the military when World War II broke out. He was injured a year into his military service, resulting in the loss of his leg. Because of this, he was discharged from the German Army.

In 1941, he set out to get his masters at the Academy of Graphic Arts and the Book Trade in Leipzig. He took classes in calligraphy, typesetting, printing, drawing, etching and lithography. He studied under prefessors such as Professor Hans Theo Richter and Professor Georg Belwe. When he completed his masters, Lange became the assistant to Professor Walter Tiemann at the Leipzig Institute.

After the war ended, Lange did freelance work in Leipzig.
He moved to Berlin in 1949 and attended the University of Pictorial Arts, where he studyed freelance art with Professor Paul Strecker and drawing with Professor Hans Ullman. Berlin in 1949 and undertook further studies in painting and drawing at the Hochschule füldende Künste. While in Berlin, Lange also did some freelance painting. This is apparent in his typefaces, as many of them have calligraphic influence. His early works, such as Derby and Boulevard are script fonts. His later works Champion and El Greco are scripts as well. When he graduated, Lange continued to do freelance work. His first major client was Berthold AG, the typeface foundry. He became artistic director in 1961 and continued to hold this position 1990.

Lange is responsible for all of Berthold AG's growth in typeface since 1960. He helped to revive several classic typefaces and designed some of his own (including Concorde and Imago). He was known for his meticulous attention to detail, and this is apparent in his work. For example, in looking at Akzidenz Grotesk, it is very clear that attention has been paid to consistency in the form of each letter. Everything is cleanly aligned and nothing seems out of place. Lange was also good at making something very simple seem very effective. For example, the tail on the "Q" in Akzidenz Grotesk. Although it is very minimal, it is a shape that has never been seen before.

Aside from his career as a typographer and artistic director, Gunter Gerhard Lange was also a teacher. He began teaching in 1955. He taught first in Berlin, where he taught for five years. He went on to teach and lecture about graphic arts in Hamburg, Leipzig, Munich and Vienna.

09) "It is the work of anonymous typecutters: craftsmen, specialists, whose professional background and experience meant they were familiar with the finest subtleties and principles, and not just those of Grotesque. They gave Akzidenz-Grotesk the ultimate accolade a typeface can have: a functional, formal rightness, transcending the whims of fashion."

-- Karl Gerstner

Font Classification

Font Classification exists because typographers needed a way to organize the various styles throughout the eras of the letterform, and separate their own era from the past. Fonts are classified based on serifs, weights, and the stress of the typeface. Old Style: This classification originated in the Renaissance period. These fonts are usually low-contrast with diagonal stress and "bracket" serifs. Examples include Bembo, Caslon, and Garamond Transitional: This classification designed to build off of the styles of the Renaissance period. The contrast became more defined and the brackets became lighter. Examples include Baskerville, Perpetua, and Caslon. Modern: Due to advances in technology, Modern styles are more technically exact. THey feature extreme contrast and flatter serifs. Example include Bodoni, Bauer Bodoni, and Walbaum. Slab Serif: This classification was needed as posters, flyers, and advertisements became more important to businesses. These fonts generally have only one weight and feature very flat serifs. Examples include Serifa, Rockwell, and Memphis Clarendon Sans Serif: Fonts from the 19th century that don't use serifs. There are many different classifications of sans-serif fonts, including geometric, grotesque, and humanist. Each of these differ in weight and stress. Examples include Gill Sans, Frutiger, and Univers Script: These fonts are based on the fluid strokes of handwriting. Script can be "casual" or "formal," depending on how closely they resemble formal calligraphy. Examples include Kuenstler Script,Caflisch Script, and FIG Script. Blackletter: Typefaces based on writing used from 1150 to 1500. This classification comes in many forms, because versions were created in many European nations. Examples include Old English, Rotunda, and Fraktur. Grunge: Fonts that often look distressed or "Do It Yourself." Many of these fonts feature stencil marks or dirty looking marks outside of the letters. Examples include AcidDreamer, Argosy, and Dark Horse. Monospaced: Also called a "fixed-width" font because each letter occupies the same amount of space. These fonts were first designed for typewriters. Examples include Courier, Monaco, and Prestige Elite

Representatives

ITC

The International Typeface Corporation was founded in 1970 by Herb Lubalin and Aaron Burns. The ITC was important because they were the first to make their typefaces readily available to designers. While manufacturers like Linotype and Monotype provided the equipment necessary to produce type and sold typefaces designed to work on their own machines, the ITC gave their customers the ability to reproduce their typefaces on any machine. The in turn paid their designers a royalty based on the sale of their designs. This, however, eventually became a problem because it allowed designers to pirate these typefaces.

The ITC now a huge bank of fonts that are all available at their website, http://www.itcfonts.com/. Fonts are available for purchase in themed packs, or one-by-one.

The ITC has designed fonts such as Goudy Sans, Woodland, and Luna. I really liked Luna a lot because it had some shapes I had never seen before. For example, the lowercase "o" on the bold version of Luna. I like the way it is weighted to one side. It seems as though you generally see o's that are completely symmetrical.

Matthew Carter

Born in 1937, Matthew Carter developed a wide range of typefaces, thanks mostly to his background in metal type, phototype, and digital type. Carter's designs have been very influential over the past few decades because they cover so many different styles and utilized so many different technologies. Carter began his career with a punch-cutting internship with a printing house in the Netherlands. He then went on to freelance in London. He freelanced for six years as a typemaker and then a type designer. In 1965, he became the house designer for Merganthaler Linotype in New York. Carter then moved back to London to do more freelance work.

Some of Carter's most well-known fonts are Verdana, Shelley Script, Yale, and Big Caslon. These fonts are now available through Carter & Cone Type Inc., who produce and market the designs of Matthew Carter.

One Matthew Carter typeface that really stood out to me was Big Caslon. I think it's really interesting how Carter designed two different Q's for each typeface. In Big Caslon, Carter offers a Q with a short tail, as well as one with a long tail. I like the long-tail Q because it's much different from most other Q's in that has such a straight tail.

Adobe Fonts

Adobe was established in 1984 in Mountain View California. Adobe is so important because they are one of the first to have a stronghold on the computer-based typography. They revolutionized printing by developing the PostScript Language, which allowed images to be printed with clean, curved lines. Adobe followed this up with Adobe Type Manager (1989), which allowed typography to be smooth on-screen as well. Computer type had previously been more pixelated. Adobe would continue to revise and improve their programs for the next two decades and they remain at the forefront of computer publishing. Adobe also began to create its own typefaces under the name Adobe originals. These typefaces were mostly revivals of older faces such as Garamond and Caslon. They eventually came out with new designs such as Trajan and Lithos.

These fonts can now be purchased at http://www.adobe.com/type/.

One Adobe font I really liked was Bickham Script Pro. I generally don't really like scrpt fonts because they often look to thin or delicate, and therefore don't standout. However, the Bickham Script uses a nice contrast of line widths and weights that make this typeface really pleasing to the eye.

Animal Logos

Here are some logos using animals that I think are pretty effective....







I really like the Bulls logo because it's so simple and symmetrical. It's lasted so long and I feel that that's a pretty good sign of an effective design.

The Orioles logo is interesting because it's a lot more realistic than a lot of other logos, but because of the flat coloring and lack of value changes it works really well.

The Bills logo is also really effective because it is so simple. It says a lot with a really simple silhouette and the red line adds a lot of movement.

Who is Adrian Frutiger?

Adrian Frutiger was one of the most important Typographers of the twentieth century. Frutiger was born in Interlaken, Sweden. As a boy, he showed early interest in Typography when he played with inventive handwriting that deviated from the perfect cursive he was taught to write in. Frutiger also showed interest in sculpture, but this hobby was discouraged by his father and his teachers.

In Interlaken, Frutiger spent his teen years working as an apprentice for printer Otto Schaerffli. He later went to Zurich to study under Walter Kach and Alfred Willimann at the School of Applied Arts. At this school, students focused more on calligraphy than constructing letters with drafting tools.

Adrian Frutiger created many typefaces in his lifetime, with the most recognizable being Univers and Frutiger. Frutiger was used for Charles de Gaulle International Airport because its legibility fit the need for "way-finding signage." Univers was part of a group of sans-serif fonts that were released in 1957. Univers is unique because it uses a system of numbers, rather than names, to distinguish different members of the font family. This family consists of 44 numbered faces. The Univers grid serves as a system of organization for the font family. The grid organizes the typefaces in such a way that we can tell how each member was derived from the original Univers typeface.

Who is John Baskerville?

John Baskerville was a famous typographer and businessman from Great Britain. Born in 1705, Baskerville started out as a printer in Birmingham, England. He worked for the University of Cambridge in 1958.

Baskerville created many typefaces, with the help of his punchcutter, John Handy. Many of these typefaces were very similar, and were all lumped into the "Baskerville" font family. Benjamin Franklin noticed and admired these typefaces and brought them to the United States. They were eventually used for American government publishing. In the 1920's, some of Baskerville's fonts were revived and rereleased under the name "Mrs. Eaves," as Baskerville's wife's name was Sarah Eaves.

Aside from his accomplishments in the field of Typography, John Baskerville also in innovator in print, paper, and ink production. He came up with a way to make paper that was smoother and whiter, which made rich black text look much better. In printing, Baskerville was ahead of his time because he was the first to use layouts with wide margins and leading between each line of type.

Baskervile died in January of 1775, and was buried in the garden at his home. The remains of his body have since been moved on numerous occasions do to the demolishing of several buildings where his body was stored.

John Baskerville was unique because of the innovations he made in typography and printing. Rather than trying to cram loads of text onto one page, Baskerville strived to improve legibility by adding larger text and improving word spacing. This gave his layouts a much more modern look than the other typographers of his time.

TYPE 01 Vocab

01 - absolute measurement: Units that have a definite size, such as a point.
02 - relative measurement: Units that depend on viewing quality, such as pixels.
03 - point: 1/72 of an inch
04 - pica: 12 points
05 - em (and em dash): A unit of measurement equal to the point size of the current font.
06 - en (and en dash): The width of a piece of type half the width of an em.
07 - legibility: The quality of type that affects the perceptibility of a word, line, or paragraph.
08 - rag: The irregular or uneven vertical margin of a block of type.
09 - word spacing: Word spacing can range from min=75%, max=150% for short columns and min=90%, max=125% for longer columns.
10 - rivers: Visually unattractive gaps appearing to run down a paragraph of text.
11 - indent: To set in from the margin
12 - leading: The spacing between lines of text.
13 - kerning: The spacing between letters.
14 - tracking: A universal spacing between all characters.
15 - weight: How thick or thin the character is. Most typefaces will come in regular and bold.
16 - scale: The size of the x-height of each character in points.
17 - typographic variation: Allows the designer to build quality styles in the typeface itself.
18 - orphan: A very short line (usually one word), or the end of a hyphenated word, at the end of a paragraph or column.
19 - widow: A single word, part of a word or very short line, except it appears at the beginning of a column or page.

Reading 1

I liked the part on page 12 that talked about how wall graphic forms have a dual existence. We often take our most basic symbols for granted. As the author said, even the period can have some symbolic meaning. We generally think of fit as being just a form of punctuation.

I also liked the part from Understanding Comics that discussed the difference between "receiving" and "perceiving." I think we generally tend to separate these two ideas, and overlook the fact that there is some transition or gray area between the two. As graphic designers, our work can be the most effective when we find the balance between our audience's reception and perception.

Josef Muller Brockmann is...

Josef Muller Brockmann was a Swiss graphic designer, born in 1914.  He studied architecture, design , and the history of art at school in Zurich.  Brockmann worked as a freelance illustrator and graphic designer once he was finished with school.  He opened his own studio in 1936, which specialized in graphic design and photography.  Brockmann was a founding editor of The New Design, and eventually became the design consultant for IBM. 

Brockmann also had several books published.  His works included The Graphic Artist and His Design Problems (1961), Grid Systems in Graphic Design (1961), History of the Poster (1971), and A History of Visual Communications (1971).

A modular grid is a graphic design grid system that uses uniformly sized rectangles or squares that let the designer build his composition from the ground up.  Each module can be filled with text, images, or left as white space.  The grid is important because it keeps the designer from producing compositions that are unbalanced or out of line.  It gives the designer an opportunity to play around with the elements of the design, rather than putting down one object and building around it.

Josef Muller Brockmann is important to us because he was ahead of his time in terms of page structure. This allowed him to make effective compositions every time, and therefore make the most effective advertisements or posters.

Jan Tschichold is...

Jan Tschichold was a master typographer.  He was originally trained in calligraphy, as he was the son of a signwriter.  In spite of his old-school training, Tschichold adopted modernist views in the early 1920's.  He remained an advocate for modernism throughout the twenties.  He was a fan of all sans-serif fonts, designs that weren't centered, and was one of the first to use various sizes and weights of type. 

Tschichold's most well-known book was Die neue Typography, or The New Typography.  This book was a sort of bible for modern design.  It included his rules for modern design, and ushered us into an era where consumers needed their information quickly and efficiently. At the time, The New Typography was very influential to designers and typographers in Germany, but did not get much press in the United States. Tshichold also wrote The Form of the Book and The Modern Design Dictionary.

In 1931, Tschichold designed three typefaces: Transit, Zeus, and Saskia.  In 1967, he released the typeface Sabon.  This font was named after Jacques Sabon, who was a famous typographer.  The Sabon typeface was first used by Bradbury Thompson for the Washburn College Bible.  

The Tschichold grid was a system of columns that gave designers a starting place for their compositions.  Since elements of the design could be aligned with the lines of the grid, giving them an easy way to space and place each image or block of text on the page.  The grid made it easy to try lots of different arrangements of text, whether they were symmetrical or asymmetrical.  

Jan Tschichold is important to us because he was one of the first designers to focus on strong aesthetics and type hierarchy.  Though he eventually dabbled back into his classic roots, Tschichold help introduce the design industry to the modern consumer, who didn't have time to read a page worth of text as they walked by a poster on their way to work.

What Is A Grid

1. In design, a grid is a set of rectangles or squares of equal size that break up the work space. Grids give the designer an easy way of visualizes and placing each element, such as pictures or blocks of text, on the page.

2. Designers use a grid because it is an easy way of visualizing a design. Rather than approaching a blank sheet of paper or a blank computer screen, the grid lets the designer space out each element of the composition quickly and in an orderly fashion.  This is beneficial to the designer because he or she will be guaranteed to have some consistency in spacing, rather than having crooked pictures or type.

3. A modular grid is a grid that is broken down into rectangles (modules), rather than just lines like on graph paper.  These modules are helpful to designers because they often deal with rectangle-shaped elements, such as photographs or blocks of text.

4. Parts of the grid....

Margins: the border or white space around the grid. Text and images generally don't bleed into the border.

Columns: The lines running vertically that separate the grid into modules.

Grid Modules:  The rectangle shapes inside the grid. These modules can be fill with pictures and text, or left as white space.

Flowlines: The horizontal lines in the grid.

Gutter: The empty space between modules.

5. A hierarchy is any ranking of importance. In type, designers use varying sizes, spacing, color, and placement of type to achieve a hierarchy.  This way, the most important information in the composition will be the most prominent.

6. A designer can achieve a type hierarchy by using contrast.  The most important thing on the page, such as a title or a headline, will most likely be larger, bolder, or in a more prominent color than the other text.  This way, if someone only walks by and briefly glances at the image, they will see the most important information first.

7. Each font comes in a variety of widths and weights. For example, a font might come in a regular, condensed, bold, and italic version.  These styles will often also be mixed and matched.  The collection of styles a font is available in is called the font family.