From the course: The 33 Laws of Typography

Unlock this course with a free trial

Join today to access over 22,600 courses taught by industry experts.

05 Maintain a visual hierarchy

05 Maintain a visual hierarchy

From the course: The 33 Laws of Typography

Start my 1-month free trial Buy for my team

05 Maintain a visual hierarchy

“

- Law five, Maintain a Visual Hierarchy. Maintaining a visual hierarchy is going to make your documents more professional, and it will make your messages more memorable. A visual hierarchy directs the flow of a document and it does this by making the document structure clear to your readers. So, a document structure may include things like document titles, chapter titles, headings, subheadings, body text, page headers, and page footers. And so, your job is to format each of these elements in a way that makes this structure visible. Now, a document structure is hierarchical, and that means that some elements are subordinate to other elements. Your goal is to reveal this hierarchy and each element's place in it. And there are a lot of different ways you can indicate visual hierarchy. You can use bold, italics, type size, type face, type weight, white space, rules, boxes, leading, letter spacing, or uppercase characters. So, let's look at a typical document hierarchy. At the top level…

Contents