Typography in Graphic Design: A Guide to Understanding Typography


Graphic design helps us bring our dreams to life. Great designs drive products and make businesses household names by quickly and easily communicating what creators have to offer. This is impossible without some type of text on the page. Well-designed and properly wielded, typography maximizes and even increases the impact of your messaging.

What is typography?

Typography is the design or arrangement of type and text elements. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but pictures alone are not enough to get customers to visit your site or purchase your product. Choice of font and placement of text are just as important as images. There are several different criteria to consider when evaluating a typeface.

Font

The two most important things to consider when choosing a font for a project are the font's tone and its legibility. Formal fonts are more rigid, while more innovative or casual fonts may be rounder, angled, or bolder characters. If the brand has strictly professional messaging, choosing a playful font may alienate your client and confuse their customers.

While matching the brand's tone is helpful for narrowing font options, it is possible that a font fits with a brand's identity, but is difficult to read. Using an illegible text defeats the purpose of using text, so be sure that characters in your font are easily identifiable.

Size and spacing

The width and height of individual characters varies between fonts. If your design uses multiple fonts, choosing fonts of similar dimensions will allow for a more seamless transition. Font sizes are most often expressed in points, which measure 1/72 of an inch, but with the rise of digital media, fonts are also being measured in pixels.

Font spacing is just as important in the digital space as it is in physical print. When choosing a font for an element that may change values due to geography or personalization, designers may reach for a monospaced font instead of a proportional font to ensure that a user's experience unfolds as expected.

Measure

The measure of a text block is simply its width. User experience generally improves with lines of shorter width and paragraphs of shorter height, though it is possible to have text elements be too short. If blocks are too narrow, a user can't scan your text easily for points of interest. If paragraphs are too short, related information may not be optimally grouped.

This consideration isn't limited to media. It even finds its way into applications like text editors. Most editors today give the user the option to wrap their lines after 80 characters to make working with a long line of text easier.

Hierarchy

The world is moving at an ever-increasing pace, which means that as a designer, you have to plan for consumers skimming over the text in your design. To be sure your design is still impactful, you can call out the essential pieces of your message by increasing the font size. If increasing font size is not an option, bolding a font or changing the text color can also draw attention to the text.

Why typography is important in graphic design

The fruits of graphic design labor - advertisements, websites, and so much more - will be viewed without the designer present to clarify the meaning of elements used. The work has to communicate clearly on its own, making typography a fundamental piece of graphic design. The font used must be consistent with the tone used in brand messaging.

Incorporating typography into your designs

At CorelDRAW, we understand the importance of typography in your designs. In addition to image editing features, CorelDRAW products include an easy-to-use array of text tools. Whether your work is primarily illustration or text, our graphic design software is capable of helping you deliver high-quality designs quickly and easily.


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