Not following typography rules will cost you readers
Tuesday’s Design Tip for Graphic Designers
Mark my words: you’ll lose readers if you don’t follow typography. The typography rules are there to make it pleasing and easy for readers to go through your layout.
Not following them makes you look amateurish.
Two ways to go wrong with typography:
- Not following typography rules which wrote about in last week’s post and in one of my newsletters.
- Not using the special characters that are now available on the computer (remember, we are no longer limited to the typewriter which included only the alphabet, numbers, and a few other characters).
- Using inappropriate typefaces.
Achieving professional results through better typography:
- Hyphens (-): used only to combine, hyphenate, and separate
- En dashes (–): replaces the word “to”
- Em dashes (—): separate phrases or thoughts
- Tick marks (‘ and “): used only for measurements
- Apostrophes (‘): for possessions, contractions, and excluding letters
- True quotes should always be used*
- True ellipsis (…): never three periods…
- Copyright symbol (©): replaces “Copyright”or “Copr.”
- Registration symbol (®): for “Federal Registration”
- Registered symbol (™): for “Registered Trademark”
C O N C L U S I O N
Here is a two-step process where I will teach you how to effectively and correctly use typography:
- Typography rules: last week’s post and my newsletter
- Special characters: my newsletter will talk about how to create and use special characters from your computer (in either MAC or PC environments)
- Typography on the web: professional punctuation and symbols, special characters of the Latin alphabet, Greek characters, and technical or mathematical characters.
F O O T N O T E S
* The American standard uses double quotes, whereas the British use single quotes
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