Typography Rules and Terms

-- Parts of the grid: what are the following:
- margin: The whitespace around the edges of a spread
- column: A vertical strip in a grid
- alley: A narrow space between columns used to keep adjacent objects separated
- module: A unit of rectangular space in a grid
- gutter: A space in down the middle of a spread where space is left for the spine/fold of the book or magazine.
- folio: A leaf, which consists of two pages (front or "recto," and the back or "verso")

-- What are the advantages of a multiple column grid.? Gives needed flexibility for documents with a complex hierarchy.

-- Why is there only one space after a period? Because fonts have spaces that are not the same width as a character, so discerning a space between sentences is not an issue as it was when typewriters were used (typewriters are monospaced)

-- What is a character (in typography)? One letter, number or other symbol.

-- How many characters is optimal for a line length? words per line? ~70, ~15

-- Why is the baseline grid used in design? To create a sense of coherency and order. People like to see things line up.

-- What is a typographic river? A ribbon of white space in the middle of a paragraph that is improperly justified.

-- What is a clothesline or flow line or hangline? An imaginary guideline that multiple objects hang from and that extends across a spread and often throughout an entire magazine.

-- How can you incorporate white space into your designs? Like this


















-- What is type color/texture? Text can be used as an aesthetic enhancement so that it appears to give the page texture when one views the entire page. It is important to think of your text boxes as fields of textural color as well as text.

-- What is x-height, how does it effect type color? The height of lowercase letters disregarding any ascenders.

-- Define Tracking. Extra space between (many) characters.

-- Define Kerning. Why do characters need to be kerned? What are the most common characters that need to be kerned (kerning pairs)? Usu. small adjustments in the spacing between two characters to make them appear equally spaced. Some character combinations appear unevenly spaced when next to each other, most commonly the capitals 'T,' 'Y,' 'V,' and 'W' (which have negative space underneath their extremities) and lowercase letters or capitals that slant the other way (such as 'A'). Some common "kerning pairs" have recommended kerning settings embedded into fonts and are applied automatically. Examples include AV, WA, Ro, etc. Periods after letters with overhanging right-side parts also present a kerning problem.

-- In justification or H&J terms what do the numbers: minimum, optimum, maximum mean? They are referring to word spacing and represent the range of options the spacing algorithm has (min/max) and the ideal word spacing that it should try to achieve as much as possible (optimum). Values are taken in a percentage of the regular space width.

-- What is the optimum space between words?

-- What are some ways to indicate a new paragraph. Are there any rules? First-line or hanging indent, space between paragraphs.

-- What are the rules associated with hyphenation? Avoid more than two consecutive lines being hyphenated, only hyphenate at a syllable break, avoid hyphenation in non-body text such as callouts.

-- What is a ligature? A character that combines multiple letterforms, such as an ampersand (E and T)

-- What does CMYK and RGB mean? Color spaces utilizing combinations of Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black and Red, Green and Blue respectively. CMYK is an substractive color space and is used in print, RGB is additive and used in monitor and television displays. Using a CMYK space in a computer document will appear on screen as an approximation of what the picture or document will look like printed, though it is technically still displayed with red, green and blue light.

-- What does hanging punctuation mean? Moving the punctuation outside the bounding box so that the overall alignment appears more straight.

-- What is the difference between a foot mark and an apostrophe? What is the difference between an inch mark and a quote mark (smart quote)? Apostrophes and quotes curve or slant toward the characters they surround, while foot/inch marks are vertical.

-- What is a hyphen, en dash and em dashes, what are the differences and when are they used? An em dash is a dash that is the full width of the character bounding box of the M in a font (or the point size, to put it another way), an en dash is half as wide (approximately the widh of an N), and a hyphen is 1/3 the width of an em dash.
En dashes are used to separate a parenthetical thought in mid text and always is surrounded by spaces. Some style guides recommend use of an em dash, either spaced or not, for this purpose. En dashes are also used in place of a hyphen when running together multiple-word or already hyphenated compound adjectives (such as in non-San Franciscan). Furthermore, the en dash is used to mean "through" in the context of denoting lengths of time and the like. (9:00--10:00)
Hyphens are used to hyphenate words.
Em dashes are often used to separate text, as mentioned earlier.


-- What is a widow and an orphan? A single word left on the last line of a paragraph / One or two words on a new page that are continued from a paragraph earlier in the document.