We recently purchased this book for our studio / brains / eyes and have finally had time to read through it all.
Apart from the beautiful stock of the inner pages and it’s soft leather cover, there was definitely a lot to learn from ‘Type matters!’, so I thought I’d share just a few of the things I have learnt:
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1. The terms ‘upper’ and ‘lower case’ come from metal setting, where ‘lower case’ letters sat in a case below the ‘upper case’ which contained the capitals
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2. It’s ok to challenge text your computer lays out for you – it doesn’t necessarily make your type setting look ‘good’ all the time! (especially with large display fonts)
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3. ‘Colour’ of type setting refers to the visual blackness of a body type against the background of a page or screen. For example, the difference between using the same font, size and leading for body copy, except one is light and the other is bold – you’ll see less white space with bold than you would with light!
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4. General rule: never expand or decrease a lines width of type more than 2%
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5. Be careful when using apostrophes and quotation marks – it is better to use ‘true quotation marks’ for quotes, and the best way to find this out is to match them to the comma of the font you are using
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6. An ampersand (&) is derived from the word ‘et’ which is Latin fro ‘and’. It is actually a ligature of ‘e’ and ‘t’ – this is probably the most interesting point I’ve learn’t so far…