InDesign: Typography

Course Overview

Type is the area that many designers have had no formal training in and have the least knowledge of. Good typography however, can transform an ordinary document or design into an outstanding piece of communication. This course covers the principles of type, outlines what works and what doesn't and provides practical examples of how to produce typographically excellent documentation using the powerful set of typographic controls in Adobe InDesign.

Course Outline

THE CHARACTER OF TYPE

• Different type personalities - classy, serious, fresh, authoritative, fun, reliable etc. Examples of type that really works

SERIF AND SANS SERIF

• The origins of the serif
• Classic serif typefaces
• Classic sans-serif typefaces

MEASURING TYPE

• Traditional conventions; points, picas and ciceros

LEADING AND KERNING

• Ways of controlling the vertical space between text
• Ways of controlling the horizontal space between characters
• Troublesome kerning pairs
• Optical kerning in InDesign

LEGIBILITY ISSUES

• What the Swiss school can teach us
• Choosing a typeface
• Typefaces that work well together
• Using white space effectively
• Font families

TYPOGRAPHIC ELEMENTS

• Using rules, dingbats, symbols and glyphs
• Ligatures and hanging indents
• Examples of great typography
• Type and colour
• Using contrast
• Type for on-screen display
• Colour theory

FONT ISSUES

• Font problems
• Font conversion
• uying fonts
• Trouble-free printing
• Embedding fonts