Sunday, January 25, 2015

Combining Typefaces

Great Article by Smashing Magazine

Good one from Adobe

Wednesday, January 29, 2014

Examples of How to





Monday, April 1, 2013

Spine reads Down

Remember that spines in the USA read down. Not up. PLEASE make yours read DOWN.

Justification Settings

If you are justifying text you will be unsuccessful (meaning it will be ugly) if you do not have enough 1) characters per line, 2) if you do not use hyphenation and 3) if you do not adjust your justification settings.

1) to get more characters per line (remember a character is a letter, number, punctuation and space) you can reduce the size of the type and you would have more characters per line. Please do not go below 7pt type.

2) turn hyphenation on. you need to just check the box in the paragraph panel

(remember TRY not to use awkward hyphenation such as de-
sign, try not to hyphenate proper nouns)















3) change the justification setting in the paragraph panel, options justification
try changing the numbers to
80 82 85
0 0 1%

here  is link to visually refresh your memories.

Real quotes or smart quotes

Remember that " are inches and ' is a foot mark. If you copied and pasted from the internet it may have kept the web type you need to retype your quote mark and see if it changes. It does not have to have a ball or slab serif to be a real quote -- just a bit of an angle. If you see no change try
option shift ] for single apostrophe ’
option shift [ for quote mark ”

Even Lawyers know the rules. You have to fix this!

Hanging Quotes in Illustrator

Ok if you are using " on your cover 1st make sure they are real quotes. And HANG them here is how to do it. You have to be in the Paragraph "panel".

Line Length

Column too wide? To Narrow?

No Widows

Sorry don't want to be insensitive but in typography we have to delete the world of widows.

Paragraph Rule

Never indent the first line in a paragraph -- this is a NEVER

Hyphen, En Dash, Em Dash

We learned them last semester but you have forgotten...
hyphen -
en dash (option - ) –
em dash (option shift - ) —





THREE is the magic number!

Ok not sure you have learned this so here it is...

Do not use more than 3 different type sizes on any composition. So on your bookjackets (front, back, spine, flaps) try using only 3 different sizes. If after you have tried 3 and really feel you need a forth then go for 4 sizes.

Also if you are using only 1 font use up to 3 styles, no more

If you are using 2 fonts (one serif, one sans serif) no more than 2 styles in each of those fonts.
NEVER (ok there are exceptions) use 2 Sans Serif font or 2 Serif fonts in the same composition.
The exception is if one of the fonts is a "display" font.


No Faking Small Caps

can't be any uglier than a fake small caps Don't click that BUTTON use a font with small caps or don't use them at all EVER!

Saturday, March 9, 2013

Join ProtoType FB Group

https://www.facebook.com/groups/KUPrototype/

Join the ProtoType facebook group (some of you have joined already). It is a place to find out about events, internships, tips from peers and alumni....

Tuesday, March 5, 2013

Chip Kidd

Sunday, March 3, 2013