10 typography tricks every designer should know
Guest Contribution
If the most dangerous thing you’ve done today has been to put some slightly out-of-date milk on your cornflakes, illness these amazing illustrations by Kerry Hyndman might inspire you to spice up your life with a little more risk.
They come from Survivors: Extraordinary Tales from the Wild and Beyond, a book Hyndman worked on with writer David Long. It’s a collection of 23 real-life stories of survival from around the world, in which the protagonists have fought for their lives against the elements – and lived to tell the tale.
Some of the stories will be familiar to you, such as Ernest Shackleton’s death-defying South Pole expedition, and the close shave with a grizzly bear that inspired the film The Revenant. Others are less well-known, including the tale of a teenage girl who survived a plane crash and trekked through the Amazon rainforest to safety.
The aim of the collection is to inspire children and help them understand how far self-belief and bravery took these adventurers, and how far it could take them too. It’s just been unveiled as the winner of the 2017 Blue Peter Book Award for ‘best book with facts’.
Hyndman, a keen snowboarder who’s no stranger to adventure herself, has brought these inspiring tales to life with a series of dramatic illustrations that focus on the scale and intensity of the book’s various landscapes. She’s also worked with her brother, filmmaker/animator Alex Hyndman, to create an animation based on one of her illustrations (you can watch it above).
Kerry Hyndman talks us through her 10 favourite illustrations…
The hardest thing about the commission was keeping it exciting while ensuring it was still suitable for children. “I found the main challenge was to create enough variety in the illustrations while finding angles to draw that didn’t show too much blood and gore, as some of the tales are pretty gritty!” she says.
Hyndman created all of her illustrations digitally, using Illustrator to draw out the compositions and then finishing them off in Photoshop with a combination of photographs, scans and hand-drawn textures.
“This was such a dream commission for me,” she says. “I got to research and draw some awe-inspiring scenes in epic mountain ranges and snowy tundra, which are some of my favourite things to draw!”
‘Survivors: Extraordinary Tales from the Wild and Beyond’ is available now from Faber & Faber.
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In this article we’re going to reveal some typography tips and tricks that you can use to boost your design skills and impress friends and colleagues. But before you even begin getting into the intricacies of setting type in the likes of InDesign, visit this it’s important to know the basics. If you need a refresher on type terms then check out our article What is typography? Learn the basic rules and terms of type!
For this article, though, the most important thing you need to know is the difference between kerning and tracking. Kerning is the spacing between specific pairs of letters, whereas tracking works across a range of characters, or even entire paragraphs or documents.
Kerning is a fine art – and one you can quickly get good at using InDesign’s tools and some tricks in InDesign, Illustrator and Photoshop. In InDesign or Illustrator, you can adjust kerning by selecting the Type tool and clicking on the gap between two characters, before holding down alt/opt and using the left and right arrows to adjust the space between them. By default the increment applied with each press of the arrow is 20 thousandths of an em, but you can adjust this preference for tighter control.
Once you’ve got the hang of that, read on to discover how you can take your typography skills to the next level…
01. Kern upside down
Why would you want to kern character pairs upside down? Because this enables you to see your letterforms and the space between them without actually reading the words – bringing meaning to them. If you’re doing something fancy with the kerning based on the meaning this won’t work, of course, but otherwise it’s a well-used and tested technique and one you should try if you’re struggling with kerning character pairs.
02. Blur it
Another tested technique is to blur the type, perhaps by taking a screenshot and blurring it in Photoshop … or more likely just squinting a little bit. Like Brian Hoff says: “I like to blur my eyesight a bit by squinting or crossing my eyes. This enables me to focus on the contrast and white space of the letterforms without becoming distracted by the characters themselves.” It’s a great technique, and you can find plenty expert kerning tricks in this brilliant article from Brian Hoff.
03. Kern with balloons
Another, perhaps more abstract kerning tip is to imagine that between each letter there are balloons of equal size and volume, forcing the letters apart. As designer Tom Sewell says: “Aim to space the letters so that the balloons fit exactly between them without being squeezed out above and below”. It’s an interesting technique, and one that can prove very handy.
04. Use ‘o’ to space words
Another tip is to always consider the spaces before and after the word you’re working on and ensure they are spaced correctly visually. A good rule of thumb is to imagine that the character ‘o’ sits between each word (thanks again to Tom for that one).
05. Rough out headlines
Kerning and tracking is most obvious in headlines, so it’s essential to get it right. And sans-serif fonts can accentuate your mistakes.
When working with sans-serif headlines, make sure you get a rough tracking before you kern. If you have to put -10 kerning between almost every character combination, you should be using tracking at -10 before you do your individual character spacing.
This goes for numbers too. The numeral ‘1’ with anything before or after it (‘213’, for example, or even a space) will always benefit from a tighter kern. More than one ‘1’ (for example, combinations such as ‘11’) needs really tight kerning.
Next page: five more top typography tricks…
06. Forget about small caps
John D Berry knows his stuff – after all, he’s written several books on type and typography. His top tip? Unless you know the difference between true small caps and fake ones, it’s best to just forget that your design app’s Small Caps command exists.
Never just shrink full-size caps down and call them small caps: they aren’t. If you’re willing to go to the trouble of using real small caps, be sure to letter-space them properly – that is, a little looser than lowercase.
07. Keep the font count low
It’s important to think of your type as a whole in your project. When you use more than three fonts in your project – say a slab, a serif and a display – it can sometimes become difficult to read and understand; the project can lack order.
Usually, one font has different weights and you can create a stunning and simple design solution using these in the correct way. The result will be cleaner and sharper. So think about whether you need many fonts or a better job can be done using different weights of just one. Thanks to Hey Studio for that one.
08. Rental revolution
There’s a new rental service in town, and it rectifies the age-old problem of not being able to try fonts to their full capacity before you pull the trigger and purchase. The service is Skyfonts from Monotype, and you can try any font from its library for five minutes, for free.
You can also use credits to rent a font for a day or a month, depending on your needs. Sure, many foundries enable you to test out characters on their site, but it’s not the same as trying them out in your preferred layout/design app. After all, the feeling of a particular font can be hard to establish until you start combining words.
09. Don’t push it (unless you really have to)
Unless you’re after a specific effect (or working on an illustrated piece) don’t stretch, skew or otherwise alter fonts by messing with its dimensions after turning to outlines.
You wouldn’t stretch a photo or refined vector piece and you can often end up with an ugly, amateurish result. If you’re going to edit a font, make sure it’s with good reason. You don’t want to ruin hours of the type designer’s work.
10. Think of type as a voice
Here’s an interesting tip we picked up from Hoon Kim of Why Not Smile: “To deal with type is much the same as to control one’s voice: [think of] selecting typefaces as voice quality; having a relationship with type in size, amount and degrees as vocal tone; and setting layouts of type as voices in space and time. Typographic design is visible as well as audible. If you have a great scenario, now it is time to cast good actors.”
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